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Welcome to Founder-Led, featuring founders scaling 7 and 8 figure companies who share the strategies and mindset driving real growth.
Brought to you by LinkedIn Growth Engine. We help established recruitment and staffing firm owners land new clients from LinkedIn by turning their executive content and insights into a trust building inbound lead engine.
We partner with $1M to $20M+ agency founders to build visibility, authority, and trust that drives pipeline, without turning you into a “content creator.” Over the last 12 months, we've helped drive $20M+ in booked revenue from LinkedIn.
If you're done relying on referrals and want prospects coming in pre sold, you're in the right place.
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Rohan
Welcome to Founder Lead. Where we sit down with some of the sharpest founder operators to learn what's working in their business today.
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Rohan
This episode is brought to you by Frontier Studios, a revenue minded content agency helping business owners grow their visibility, authority and ultimately their business from LinkedIn. So if you're ready to join over 30 founder led brands, they're turning conversations like this into real demand while spending less than one hour per week of your time.
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Rohan
Come on, frontier below and someone from our team will reach out.
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Rohan
Now let's get to today's episode.
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Rohan
Today we're joined by Mike Moriarty, founder of Arsenal Pulse.
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Rohan
Before starting Arsenal, Mike held talent leadership roles at Human Capital, Dropbox and Google, and later worked inside companies like SpaceX
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Rohan
and The Boring Company, helping build teams in some of the most demanding operating environments and tech.
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Rohan
Along the way, he developed a clear view on where traditional recruiting firms fall short.
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Rohan
Why truly great hiring requires deep operating credibility
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Rohan
and what it takes to help frontier companies build teams that actually move their industry forward.
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Rohan
In this conversation, we get into his hiring principles and how founder should think about building their own high performing teams.
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Rohan
Mike, welcome to the show.
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Mike
Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to be here.
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Rohan
Yeah. Well, you know, Mike, you've worked at some pretty iconic brands from Google to Dropbox, space, The Boring Company.
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Rohan
What did those,
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Rohan
environments and operating environments teach you? About what great hiring and people look like?
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Mike
Yeah, I think I learned a ton along the way. I started,
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Mike
one of the talent leaders, one of the few, honestly, that didn't start an agency and work my way up. I actually came from a sales background,
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Mike
and then I started in kind of big tech and worked my way smaller, smaller and smaller. And then to your point, branched out.
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Mike
But his experience kind of really informed my hypothesis and my understanding and philosophies on recruiting. You know, Google was great because yes, they're a big brand and they're exciting and winning. But they never settled for just like, you know, active talent.
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Mike
They were the ones that were really, really at the beginning, like the best person for a job has a job.
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Mike
So how do you go find court and attract the best people in the industry? Organize those people, Dewey Decimal System into your system, a record to make sure you were always, you know, staying on top of them as they're looking.
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Mike
And really kind of
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Mike
the human side of this is how do you really build a relationship with these folks when they are looking?
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Mike
You're not just solving for you to fill your job, but you're solving for them and what they're actually looking for personally, professionally. So that was really great. Got to go to Dropbox and really get a lot deeper. What I learned at Google is a lot of people responded to my email because it was at Google, not because of me.
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Mike
And so you go to Dropbox and like, okay, hey, why the heck am I gonna respond to you? So the ability to
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Mike
craft an email
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Mike
that was impactful enough and interesting enough so they actually get back to you.
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Mike
And then at Google, you're big enough where you're like, listen, we'll figure this out together. You can work at Chrome ads, Android, whatever.
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Mike
At Dropbox, you had to know. And the difference in how much data they're going to work with and like who's the team and why does this role need it? And what's the 36 now? You really had to surely understand kind of a lot more technical and be a little bit more in concert with your hiring teams, which was a great education for me, which I took with me.
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Mike
And then human Capital is just that times
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Mike
a million.
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Mike
Every stage, every founder, different funding, different verticals. And so I am really fortunate to have this,
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Mike
you know, accelerant of learning and repetition. And the difference with HCI versus, you know, typical firms, as we were operators, we weren't just tossing people over the fence.
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Mike
We got in there and we really, really kind of partnered with the teams.
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Mike
And we got, you know, we really had to understand what they were saying. And then the big takeaway there
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Mike
is, just because I've done this before doesn't mean my founders have done this before.
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Mike
And they shouldn't just trust me because I'm an old gray haired man that's done this before. How do I meet them where they're at?
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Mike
And and sometimes, you know, my tagline at the end which people can steal is like, listen, I don't agree, but I'll commit.
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Mike
But I need you to commit to when we're seeing something or the data is telling us something that we learned together. And we
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Mike
were partners in this, and that really helped me. Some of these founders is their first job and they haven't really done this. And so it really helped us like some of the best trusted relationships I have.
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Mike
We didn't actually make a ton of hires early. We learned a lot together. And having that tough feedback and feedback loop really was, you know,
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Mike
more impactful to the relationship and the trust built than just getting them a couple hires. Early days.
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Rohan
Yeah. So we have many, you know, founders and people that are actively building companies in our audience.
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Rohan
And they might be working with recruiters, reaching out with recruiters, getting hit up pirate routers,
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Rohan
how they can bring you under certain questions, or how can they discern a good and
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Rohan
a good recruiter from someone who's really experienced that's going to be a thought partner that can really find them some excellent talent.
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Mike
Yeah,
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Mike
this might be a little spicy, but yeah, a lot of people have branched out and started their own things. Now, with no fault on them.
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Mike
Questions I would ask was like one, if you're getting an email with like, hey, I have a candidate who's great, but I'm not going to share them with you and I'd love to meet you.
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Mike
You know, that's a unfortunately somewhat of a bait and switch thing that a lot of folks do.
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Mike
If you do talk to somebody or get intrigued by somebody, make sure you're, you know, check them with their background. Whoever they hired for let me talk to them. What type of roles they hired. And then the big thing I've seen a lot of folks like strategically help lead efforts in recruiting.
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Mike
But if you look at their backgrounds, they've never been in a strategic seat. They've been we've been recruiting lead, but they've never been a had a talent and understood the trade offs that founders are going to have to trade off. Like there's going to be times where they're going to trade off technology versus headcount. There's going to be times where they need to shift people to different.
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Mike
You know, they get a contract or something. How do you shift the team's focus and push without, you know, and without killing the team and the morale of the team? There's a lot of things that I would say they really want to sit down and understand who they're partnering with and what reps they've had, and then, you know, make sure it's a good fit for that.
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Mike
Just because I've done that doesn't mean I'm the right fit for everybody either.
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Mike
But that's the big thing. And I think
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Mike
the advice I would give
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Mike
that I give a lot that I think is just great, is for them to have a very strong point of view
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Mike
on both sides of the aisle in the sense of like
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Mike
not only the hard skills they're looking for and who they want at their company,
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Mike
but what are the soft skills that they're solving for and equally, if not more important,
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Mike
what are the ones that they're not willing to, to, to, to bring into their company?
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Mike
So they retract people and don't waste time assessing and interviewing, which is is costly. And or hiring the wrong person. You're just
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Mike
it's it creates especially early hires. It creates such a problem down the road. So that's that's kind of the advice. And then if they're talking to somebody
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Mike
just underwrite them, make sure they're, you know, try to meet them in person, shake their hand, get to know them, understand who they've done, what they've done, and if it's a fit, you know, that's terrible.
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Mike
It sounds like dating like you'll kind of know and you'll be in shit if you're not and it's not the right fit, then there's plenty of folks out there like myself and others that have been doing this
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Mike
a long time.
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Rohan
Yeah,
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Rohan
yeah. And it looks like, you know, coming out of those big tech companies you've really
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Rohan
chosen to specialize in, and you do tech
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Rohan
and some of these. Yeah. You know, operation heavy
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Rohan
technology businesses talk a bit about your thinking and decision
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Rohan
to be had to have like deep sector specialization. Why did you go down that path and how does it lead to the outcomes for the companies that you work with?
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Mike
I'll share my journey in here. So I spent the last 2 or 3 years in this kind of global resilience kind of portfolio for human capital and so I was very fortunate to work really early innings with like, you know, one brief one. Grant was pretty small and nominal with Bryce
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Mike
and Jason and Cam and really helped build out the teams and what I learned from there.
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Mike
And then you mentioned the Elon companies. It's like,
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Mike
I really kind of fell in love with the mission
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Mike
and like the mission for these companies especially, you know, these other these,
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Mike
you know, dual use companies
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Mike
are so critical to the United States and impactful. And it's not this is not shade on like any vertical SAS product. But I just felt more called to the mission, the tangible product than the event.
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Mike
And
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Mike
X other company. And so I really, really got pulled to that. And then Y I think specializing made a lot of sense. There's a lot of great firms out there like don't be wrong, but like
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Mike
generalist kind of treat every search the same.
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Mike
And defense tech as this is probably aggressive. But like it's not just a job, it's a mission, a culture, a a clearance.
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Mike
Like if you
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Mike
don't understand and spend their time in this world, you really can't source for it. The talent pool is deeply networked. Everybody knows everybody, and it's not huge. And your reputation matters
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Mike
incredibly high in this industry, which I love, and a bad interaction with a candidate or a handful, you know, you don't know who they know and whatever.
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Mike
So it actually carries a ton of weight.
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Mike
When I was in the venture side, we bring in these firms and when searches got tough,
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Mike
kind of understandably, they were very transactional. They would run away.
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Mike
And so we saw this opportunity, like I said, in venture, where
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Mike
that first four, six weeks where I didn't get a hire, but like bringing them along with me and being a trusted partner, we had a much longer term thinking.
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Mike
And so in searches get hard. They're always hard and we treat each search like a strategic kind of infrastructure. On the relationship end for the company.
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Mike
And we understand the long term. It builds, you know, yield the result. And so they
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Mike
typically non specialize maybe solves for placements.
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Mike
We're solving for outcomes a bad hire is
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Mike
bad energy. Like I said before on the mission sometimes literally.
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Mike
And so being embedded in this ecosystem and knowing who's available before anybody else,
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Mike
that's how we're now able to understand
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Mike
the tier one operators. And what's unique for us now is like, you know, if you're a top tier one operator in this space, you have options and you can talk to for recruiters, for for jobs who are all incentivized to get you their job.
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Mike
Or you could talk to us and we have multiple opportunities potentially for and we're actually incentivized to make sure we find the right job for you and your family, and you don't have to work across those things. So that's kind of where we're going and understanding the clearance and the Intel requirements.
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Mike
All the other challenges we're just getting more dangerous in our Rolodex, just growing, and we're able to just really attract a top team.
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Mike
So that's that was kind of our underwriting.
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Rohan
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And
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Rohan
I mean, the differentiation and the category that you're creating
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Rohan
is highly compelling, of course. And you have a lot of this pattern recognition, this deep industry,
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Rohan
expertise to work across deep tech and defense. And there's this compounding effect, it seems like based on the relationships and the roles that you're placing for.
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Rohan
But ultimately, yeah, it sounds like on the candidate side,
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Rohan
they're not being funneled into a specific company. It's really, you know, here are the top you actually have across this suite of defense or hard tech. And it's kind of like what's the best fit for them, right?
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Mike
Yeah. We and we do directly place people or companies as well. So we have another offering where it's like, listen, if I'm partnering with you and you need a mackie or multiple mackies or I had a supply chain or had a manufacturing, we directly focus on that.
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Mike
We don't. Maybe unlike other firms, we don't cross-pollinate. Meaning if I'm working with X company, we're hiring for you.
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Mike
That is all. We're not going to sell them to somebody else. I kind of have an ethical issue with that. But if they're not interested, you're not interested in at that point, we can go out. We are starting to like, build out,
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Mike
kind of a marketplace where if you're just a good candidate, will then be able to talk to you.
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Mike
But if we're working directly with a company, we directly source for that role for that company.
00:11:11:16 - 00:11:12:23
Rohan
Okay. Yeah. Interesting
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Rohan
talk a bit about like this macro trend where like defense and hard tech is sexy again. Right. For engineers and like yeah hardcore operators whether it's
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Rohan
you know Doge starting the movement and a lot of these like super bright young people like wanting to join government again or what Palmer Luckey is doing.
00:11:32:15 - 00:11:43:01
Rohan
So talk about like the macro trend that you're seeing with these top operators and engineers wanting to move into defense and hard tech and what's causing that.
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Rohan
And yeah, where do you how do you see this playing out?
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Mike
I don't know, say no. The cause is obviously money going in and that Palmer and the others that are kind of the best thing in the space and people are seeing the outsized returns and the impact. I think from the talent side, something shifted
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Mike
post 2020. And like,
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Mike
I think I what I found is like the top engineers are just simply asking, what does this actually do in the world when they're whatever they're working on?
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Mike
And a lot of them were kind of falling out of love, or we're not in love with the consumer tech side. And like
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Mike
all these conferences I've been at these places, I've been very fortunate to network and meet folks like we're in a re industrialization moment.
00:12:19:03 - 00:12:22:13
Mike
Yeah, billions of dollars are flowing into defense, energy, manufacturing, infra.
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Mike
And the smartest people kind of follow the hardest problems
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Mike
and they're there.
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Mike
You know and like this tour of duty mentality is growing. And people are you know that's how the American that's how our government was actually formed initially. It's kind of gone away from that. But like this,
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Mike
going into to be an expert in these hardware spaces is really kind of that have impacts on the national security
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Mike
is is just growing with momentum and where the money's going.
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Mike
And the pay gap has actually closed the bunch where they're paying more and there's more, you know, for the hardware, for integration experience.
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Mike
And the, the missions real the equities early
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Mike
the companies that can win in a meaningful way, you know, are going to get the best people. But like American dynamism, global resilience, it's not like a
00:13:09:21 - 00:13:10:23
Mike
political statement.
00:13:11:04 - 00:13:24:16
Mike
It's an investment thesis and a talent thesis. And the people that are building in this space need to win. And I think, like myself, as you meet these people, feel the product, see the impact and obviously outsized gains. If you do well,
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Mike
it's kind of, you know, it's a win win win and you just kind of feel it and it takes you,
00:13:29:18 - 00:13:32:18
Mike
you know, people are willing to put in the hours.
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Mike
I think this whole nine, nine, six craziness that's going on in the industry, it's like
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Mike
if there's more, if there's a limit on mission and work and impact and you know, compensation, people are willing to do the work.
00:13:44:02 - 00:13:53:02
Mike
So I don't think you need to like, brand it. It's just like finding those people. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot more folks seeing the problems that are being solved are very hard.
00:13:53:02 - 00:13:55:10
Mike
But the impact is very, you know, tangible.
00:13:55:14 - 00:14:01:04
Rohan
Yeah. Yeah. So I know you've, you know, recruited inside Elon companies as you mentioned.
00:14:01:06 - 00:14:09:14
Rohan
I'd like to kind of talk a bit about like how AI is reshaping recruiting. Right. Like, yeah, obviously like Z is at the frontier and,
00:14:09:14 - 00:14:16:10
Rohan
there's entire vertical supply chain that's being built out around chip manufacturing and energy production, all these sort of things.
00:14:16:11 - 00:14:21:20
Rohan
So talk a bit about like how you see AI changing and augmenting the recruiting function.
00:14:22:00 - 00:14:26:06
Rohan
In terms of like, yeah, what's real versus what's what's theory right now.
00:14:26:09 - 00:14:36:03
Mike
Yeah. I'll say, you know, a couple things. One, I, I hear it's not going anywhere and it's going to be super impactful. And the more and more I mess with it and build,
00:14:36:07 - 00:14:43:09
Mike
you know, databases and vectorize the data and learn about MSPs and all this stuff, like it's really just a different way of thinking. But the thinking is like
00:14:43:13 - 00:14:44:07
Mike
my handwriting.
00:14:44:07 - 00:14:49:20
Mike
At least it's not going to change what great recruiting looks like. It's just going to change how fast you can get there.
00:14:49:23 - 00:14:52:12
Mike
The judgment is still going to be human in my opinion,
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Mike
and when we use it like it's it's one of our four core values. It's not a feature, it's a philosophy here. And so we use it for source or pattern matching, drafting comms, synthesizing feedback like things that used to take a lot of time manually are now just being able to be done automatically.
00:15:11:10 - 00:15:14:23
Mike
And I think about this back in the day when I was at Google, like we first got,
00:15:15:01 - 00:15:23:04
Mike
text expander, whereas like you put in this like something and you do this and it was like quantify how much time you saved. And I was like, I remember that being the most incredible thing.
00:15:23:08 - 00:15:27:12
Mike
And then GM came along and made their database and it was like auto sequencing emails.
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Mike
I didn't have to put a calendar hold and send the second email. And so we've seen this in history. Obviously, we're at a hockey curve of like how fast it's going to go.
00:15:35:10 - 00:15:35:17
Rohan
Yeah.
00:15:35:17 - 00:15:42:12
Mike
But you know, the firms that are going to lose my opinion are the ones that are treating AI as a threat
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Mike
versus a multiplier. And so I still think the there's a human judgment in it. But I should make you sharper. And then there's still math in recruiting. Like there's still pass rates and efficiencies that you should be managing.
00:15:55:17 - 00:16:11:17
Mike
I should compress the time to get there. That's kind of our thinking and empower the teams to be, you know, even more efficient and help more people because I just like the mission of other places, the recruiters that, you know, we are fortunate to work here and are still pulse.
00:16:11:22 - 00:16:15:11
Mike
You know, their mission is to help as many people as possible work in the coolest thing ever.
00:16:15:11 - 00:16:24:11
Mike
And I know this sounds like Doctor Phil, but you can truly change the trajectory of a family's life by giving them the right opportunity and setting up them for great financial outcomes. And also
00:16:24:14 - 00:16:28:06
Mike
you know, this vertical, like you get to really work on some of the coolest problems in the world.
00:16:28:10 - 00:16:35:18
Rohan
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was just speaking to the chief product officer of HubSpot, and he's now started
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Rohan
a,
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Rohan
new CRM company, which is being reimagined around what CRM can be. And, you know, the age of AI.
00:16:42:05 - 00:16:57:08
Rohan
And he had this analogy where, you know, traditional CRM, legacy CRM is think of it as like an eight bit photo, something that's super grainy and that's just because the context that's available to them, which is like human input, it is, is just so incomplete.
00:16:57:08 - 00:17:02:13
Rohan
And a very small slice of the total context conversation that might be happening
00:17:02:16 - 00:17:08:10
Rohan
in a conversation like outside of conversation, across teams, all this sort of thing. And if AI is
00:17:08:14 - 00:17:19:14
Rohan
ultimately if really like the data is the base layer of what I can do to surface meaningful insights in a chat interface, like you're only limited by the context that you're providing it.
00:17:19:14 - 00:17:27:00
Rohan
And so what's really cool is now the interface of a CRM is pretty much like a chat or a voice interface. And isn't that.
00:17:27:00 - 00:17:27:12
Mike
Crazy?
00:17:27:15 - 00:17:41:07
Mike
Yeah, I would say the one thing he did well, too is that whole freemium model, and you start building your infrastructure within HubSpot, and then you start paying more, more. So that hubspot's been really, really cool for me on the business Feldman side. Yeah. But yeah, I think I'm spending ten bucks what I spent three months ago.
00:17:41:07 - 00:17:43:09
Mike
So I've done a really good job capturing folks,
00:17:43:11 - 00:17:44:17
Mike
once they get you in your system.
00:17:44:20 - 00:17:57:16
Rohan
Yeah. And I think that what makes that with recruiting, it's such a human business. You're having all these conversations. Think of, like, traditional in-person offices. There's so hundred percent. And now with remote, I mean, so much is getting lost. So how are you kind of accounting for that?
00:17:57:21 - 00:18:07:21
Mike
Yeah. Same thing like the rich text is like the unique text assets is the conversations. Right. So like the conversations we have candidates. Anyone else can go get their LinkedIn or whatever other voice GitHub, StackOverflow.
00:18:08:02 - 00:18:12:01
Mike
But like what have they done. And then truly what are they looking for next? Is that unique
00:18:12:04 - 00:18:16:18
Mike
thing. And being able to understand all of that, synthesize it, organize it.
00:18:16:18 - 00:18:37:17
Mike
And then to your point, bring it up at the right time, making sure we're capturing the same information for our opportunities across our portfolio and other companies and partners that we work with. How do we make sure we have as much of that as possible? That's talking to each other. So we're actually bringing together the right opportunity for the right candidate at the right time.
00:18:37:19 - 00:18:55:10
Mike
And that used to be very human driven, like even at Google back in the day, we used to have this pretty big spreadsheet where I'd have like all the teams, I think, on the left and then skill sets across the top. And I was like, this matrix, that's like, okay, if you're going to call in, you know, concurrency in this, you go down and find the ones that are there.
00:18:55:14 - 00:19:03:07
Mike
This is just that at scale. It's much more intelligence. And some kid that didn't know he was doing trying to basically like, you should work in ads because you're good at this. It's like,
00:19:03:11 - 00:19:13:15
Mike
you know, so that's that's where I think this is going to be. You know, like I said before, the companies that lean into it, the new products are going to come out that have the MCP available so you can run it through your all.
00:19:13:15 - 00:19:14:14
Mike
I, I'm are just going to be
00:19:14:19 - 00:19:25:15
Mike
differentiated like we use mercury here and like being able to have that on the payment side already is just incredible that I can query it. And I could talk about my burn rate and all these other things. It's it's pretty cool.
00:19:25:18 - 00:19:27:14
Rohan
Yeah. Shout out to Mercury. Great
00:19:27:17 - 00:19:28:11
Rohan
service.
00:19:28:13 - 00:19:51:22
Rohan
Oh well you know a theme that I want to sort of start to round out our conversation on is what founders can do themselves and learn from other iconic founders that you've worked with in terms of attracting top talent. So maybe let's start off with what have you noticed? You know, founders from the top down, what are they doing differently when it comes to building the culture that attracts elite talent?
00:19:52:02 - 00:19:53:20
Mike
Yeah, I think where I've seen
00:19:54:00 - 00:19:55:20
Mike
great founders work is like
00:19:56:00 - 00:20:10:10
Mike
they sell the problem. They're not selling the perks. Yeah. I mean, top characters don't really give a shit about unlimited PTO. They want to know why this company, why now, and why you're the one they should spend their time with and how you're going to win.
00:20:10:13 - 00:20:11:14
Mike
That's a big one.
00:20:11:18 - 00:20:24:18
Mike
Can really experience for on us. Like they do this every day. But good candidates are out there. They look at that as a signal. So then how you run your interview process? I think it's interesting if they thought about the interview experience as like a product,
00:20:24:22 - 00:20:30:21
Mike
every product they're making or service they're making as like they go, they tinker, they b test, they get feedback, they refine.
00:20:31:02 - 00:20:38:16
Mike
It is the exact same in an interview process. Right? And so it tells you everything about how you run a company if you're slow, disorganized, ghosting them,
00:20:38:20 - 00:20:46:00
Mike
that's how you work. It's a reflection. And so they get a lot of signal. And like I said before, the candidate market is really small. So you want to be really tight.
00:20:46:00 - 00:20:53:11
Mike
There. I don't think especially a lot of companies we support early early career like early like you know pre series B let's even call it.
00:20:53:14 - 00:21:00:11
Mike
And so I don't think you have to over spec the role. Like you know you're hunting for somebody who can do multiple things.
00:21:00:14 - 00:21:03:16
Mike
And so you want to get people who've actually built the things.
00:21:03:16 - 00:21:16:00
Mike
And the best people don't really have a ceiling and they want to be able to do more. So like, you know, the bigger you get, you have to kind of refine that. And like Venn diagram, it and kind of block people out. Yeah.
00:21:16:03 - 00:21:19:17
Mike
And I think making can everybody at your company
00:21:19:20 - 00:21:22:01
Mike
understand the mission and sell it along the way?
00:21:22:01 - 00:21:31:11
Mike
Because especially when you're dealing with passive talent, these are people that have a job that are talking to a on average, three companies. You know, you're not just assessing but you're selling.
00:21:31:15 - 00:21:37:13
Mike
And I think that's hard for some founders. The good ones understand it. The bad ones, not the bad ones, the ones that still have challenges
00:21:37:17 - 00:21:40:18
Mike
struggle because this is what they chose to spend their time with.
00:21:40:20 - 00:21:55:14
Mike
This is the hardest problem. This is I can't tell how many times I've heard this in our company, and it might be, but you got to bring them along with you. Versus just like since I underwrote it, this is you should underwrite it as this. Yeah. So I think that's going to be really important.
00:21:55:16 - 00:21:57:12
Mike
And, you know, speed matters.
00:21:57:14 - 00:22:06:14
Mike
Like, I just, I think that's not a shock, but like, the best candidates have options. And so, you know, making sure you're getting people through. And then the last piece, which I've kind of
00:22:06:18 - 00:22:09:09
Mike
got on my high horse about on social recently is, yeah,
00:22:09:12 - 00:22:18:09
Mike
when I had to go work at these like pretty intense, you know, places I had to sit down with my wife, who's the best human on the planet, be like, listen, there's going to be a trade off here.
00:22:18:09 - 00:22:24:06
Mike
I'm working Saturdays and Sundays now, and like, being able to attend events and things like that. I'm going to be traveling a lot, partner.
00:22:24:09 - 00:22:29:20
Mike
And it was a partnership. Right. And I'll give human capital a lot of credit. They brought Nikki into that conversation
00:22:29:23 - 00:22:31:12
Mike
and was like part of that.
00:22:31:16 - 00:22:38:23
Mike
I think early stage founders don't do that enough and understand for that person to be successful, if they have us like a family or support system,
00:22:39:04 - 00:22:42:11
Mike
that support system has to actually function at a high level as well.
00:22:42:11 - 00:22:44:22
Mike
For that person to be successful in your company.
00:22:45:03 - 00:22:46:04
Mike
So think through that
00:22:46:09 - 00:22:59:04
Mike
and bring that person into the decision, and that'll go a long way. I don't do it just to do it. Do it if you're really going to stand by it. And I think those are the especially for the people that are like, this is their second or third tour of duty, they're starting their families.
00:22:59:04 - 00:23:03:23
Mike
And priorities are a little different versus just work, and they have to balance that. But if you can think through that,
00:23:04:04 - 00:23:12:08
Mike
I think you can really win and understand, you know, that that's where I am getting more and more in work. I, you know, especially if you're in your first 15, I go to dinner,
00:23:12:12 - 00:23:17:14
Mike
go to take them out, fly to where they're at two thirds of our hires last quarter and relocate it.
00:23:17:15 - 00:23:18:06
Mike
So it's like,
00:23:18:10 - 00:23:21:05
Mike
go understand that, understand that that if they are senior,
00:23:21:08 - 00:23:34:11
Mike
let's map all the schools that are out there and make sure they have opportunity. Let's make sure we connect into a couple realtors. Like that's just be different to be human and solve that problem. If that problem solve, they're great engineer sales person, ops person, they're going to go kill it for you.
00:23:34:15 - 00:23:49:12
Mike
But if you the better you can solve for them as a human, the better you're going to be. So thank you for telling my TedTalk. But yeah, that's like I've gotten more and more on that high horse recently, but I've lived it and seen it. We're top leaders that kind of think through those things, win more often.
00:23:49:16 - 00:24:01:04
Rohan
It makes a lot of sense. Like talent. Being an extension of the product is so true. It's probably the most important parts of the product because it sends people in to build the company and build the product itself.
00:24:01:07 - 00:24:01:22
Rohan
And,
00:24:01:22 - 00:24:03:11
Rohan
yeah, it sounds like in a
00:24:03:11 - 00:24:14:01
Rohan
world where, you know, information, knowledge, intelligence is becoming more abundant and more on tap, we now have more time to do the more human thing.
00:24:14:01 - 00:24:19:18
Rohan
So there's really an argument to be made to be more human, to bring other great humans into your organization.
00:24:19:21 - 00:24:35:09
Mike
Yeah. Well said. You said that much better than I did. But yes, that is exactly what I'm trying to say. And I think the people that lean into that and lean in to the people, and if you hire people that are harder on themselves than you'll ever be, you'll be in a good spot. So just make sure you have a good partner.
00:24:35:11 - 00:24:39:04
Mike
You assess people well and you give them problems and runway to run.
00:24:39:08 - 00:24:40:10
Mike
They'll do more than you think.
00:24:40:14 - 00:24:42:02
Rohan
Love it. Well, Mike, you've given us
00:24:42:02 - 00:24:56:08
Rohan
a masterclass on again, recruiting and talent. And just based on your operating experience at these iconic companies. So thanks so much for sharing the insights. Where can folks go to learn more or if they want to connect with you, what's the best place to reach you?
00:24:56:12 - 00:24:56:23
Mike
Yeah,
00:24:56:23 - 00:24:58:21
Mike
if you go to Arsenal pulse.com,
00:24:58:23 - 00:25:06:00
Mike
please check us out. My contact info on there. You can always reach out to me directly. Mike at Arsenal pulse.
00:25:06:02 - 00:25:13:01
Mike
Excited to, you know, like a grateful to be here. Rihanna. As we're trying to get up and out and get our team out there. And,
00:25:13:01 - 00:25:16:18
Mike
if there's anybody out there we can help, just advise or connect you to anything now or in the future.
00:25:16:18 - 00:25:17:16
Mike
We'd happy to be a resource.
00:25:17:21 - 00:25:22:12
Rohan
Perfect. And we'll include all that those links in our show notes as well. Mike, thanks so much for joining.
00:25:22:16 - 00:25:23:07
Mike
Thanks for having me. But.