Akbar is the type of person who you are really eager to learn from as he has his opinions fact-checked and backed by research. Not just stand-alone studies from your local journal of esoteric sciences, from meta analyses and Google stuff. He is also open to challenges, so he is just Talent Hall of Fame if you ask Spela and Tamas. 

What did we learn in this episode?

- Optimal hiring sequence (with async participants)
- R.I.P CVs and reference calls
- How to get to DEI nirvana (remote first & work sample tasks)
- Fire if you have to but keep a friend

If you still ask for CVs from your candidates you might want to give this episode a listen.

We apologise for the subotimal sound quality on certain occasions in this episode

In this episode we get to know David who went from entrepreneur and early employee to investor and from the US to Europe.

He talks about:
- Airtable, Peloton, Uber, Airbnb, Sequoia, Benchmark, Lightspeed etc...
- Esoteric SaaS
- Running a fund that is not yet top tier and the challenge of attraction
- His distribution of time between LPs, founders, advisors and admin
- How he is learning about coaching founders

...and Tamas talks about Dennis Rodman. 🤦🤷

Bradley has a talent for selling. He also invested a lot of time into educating himself of this complex process. Icing on the cake: he sells a software to help unbias your hiring process. We surely learned a lot listening to him, hope you will too.

We chated about:
- How Bradley got into sales from studying geography
- Training sales people in a startup environment
- Biz dev vs sales as an analogy for people vs HR
- What makes a great demo
- IC to manager transition in sales teams
- Ideal sales tech stack
- Ideal comission and OTE ratio in SaS sales
- THE optimal hiring process

...and much more!

Note: Our apologies for the back then HRH Prince Charles joke at the beginning of the episode. We recorded 23 Aug 2022 and historical events since bring a more insensitive light on this than originally intended.

Yes, Maddie is every bit as awesome as you’d think.

If you’re in any way connected to the startup world, I’d recommend you listen to this episode.
She shared her insight on a wide range of topics:

• Maddie’s thoughts on the current situation in the startup world:
• What has been Peak’s strategy going through the last years of high valuations
• What can founders of startups that raised at these high valuations do now?
• What are companies cutting out of their budgets now and what are they doubling down on?
• What does Peak focus on when investing?
• What does: Making rich men richer, mean to Maddie?

And SO much more! This is an episode filled to the brim with useful information.

Did you know that Friedrich is not her real name?
An impressive episode, tackling everything from:
- working in a 3 person team to post IPO
- attracting talent as a small startup vs a bigger, established company
- changing the department's name from HR to People
- successful recruiting practices
- organizational structures
- examples of great internal communication

We're talking with ZS who has led talent departments in the public and private sector, and most recently at Onfido. Currently ZS is working as the director of people at the People Collective. 
In the previous episode, we covered everything from talent learnings, from the public and private sector, and also touched on how similar the people department structure is to an entire company structure.

Unfortunately, the people department doesn't have as high of regard in some conversations. We paused right before diving into the people debt conversation. And that's where we want to pick up the conversation today.

ZeShaan Shamsi has led in-house Talent efforts for public, semi-public, and private space entities such as the UK government’s Digital Services arm, the BBC, and Onfido (scaled Onfido from 50 to 250+ people across 7 global locations). After this experience, he was employee #1 in the PeopleCollective where besides of course owning and developing everything Talent, he is also responsible for the general quality of all the different consulting pieces.

In this episode we had the enormous pleasure of talking to Makenna Smutz. Makenna, is the co-founder at a brand new project called Wavr. Before this she was co-founder at Meeshkan a SaaS solution targeted at product teams aimed to ease UI testing. We talked to her about:

- her journey into co-foundership,
- challenges of refocusing a company on a new product,
- strategies to develop and market a SaaS product,

and much more. Hope you will enjoy this episode!

You can find Timon's two mentioned blogs and a brand new one via these links:

- Psychological Safety (https://medium.com/luminovo/on-the-bare-necessity-of-psychological-safety-bdb34e311b8c)
- Performanced-based hiring (https://luminovo.ai/blog-posts/why-we-banned-requirements-from-our-job-descriptions)
- Good feedback (https://medium.com/luminovo/giving-feedback-d2d3c25f058d)

Enjoy! :)