Building a 10 person unicorn - Max Brodeur-Urbas, Gumloop

But yeah, I'm Max, I'm the founder of Gumloop. We went through YC a year and a half ago now, winter '24. So we've been a pretty notoriously small team since then. We raised the Series A as a team of two and are now nine people, but this tweet was kind of like the one that inspired this talk, like how we scale to the size we hope to be with fewer than 10 people.

I'll be honest, I tweeted this when I was extremely caffeinated and really thought I was going to rule the world. We're on track, roughly. We're less than 10 people and growing really fast, but this was also a good Twitter post for hiring because we wanted to hire exceptional people, and I think working on a small team is really fun.

So I thought I would go over. I'm sure at this conference you've heard a lot about what AI tools to use and how to work efficiently with Cursor and Windsurf, but I was going to focus on how you actually, like once you're efficient with these AI tools, how you build a team that has theright culture and can actually scale and do the things you're setting out to do.

But the first thing I was going to go over was kind of how we got here. So I spent like six months building up a ton of terrible, terrible software. I made video game moderation software. I made ML models to detect children's age in video games so that you could separate adults from children in VR.

I made bot detection software. And then as a side project on top of my side project, I made the first UI for Auto-GPT, which was this really hyped open-source framework that came outright at the start of the agent craze.

And basically, I noticed that everyone in this Discord was excited to use AI, but they had no idea how to actually clone a GitHub repo or set things up locally. So I just spun up a really ugly UI.

I called it Agent Hub at the time. I thought it was going to be GitHub for agents. I thought this was really genius. But it was all kind of built upon the idea that agents were going to be immediately useful.

So we pivoted pretty quickly after this, but I noticed that all of the people who were asking the agent to do things were basically just describing complex workflows. Like if they knew how to write some Python, they knew how to make some API calls and some LLM queries, they could basically automate their entire request.

They don't need to cross their fingers and hope that the agent will do it for them. So yeah, that was the realization. It was my co-founder and I at this time. We just started kind of editing how you could configure an agent.

Instead of asking for everything that you wanted, you could actually define the steps as a series of nodes in a workflow. And then we got into YC a few months later. We raised the Series A. We hired two interns for the summer, and then we raised the seed.

Yeah, we raised the seed, then we raised the Series A about like four months later. And we were just a really small team, kind of overfunded, but raised a lot of money so that we could hire the most exceptional people over the next year.

And the general idea was just scale with under 10 people because we noticed after working at Amazon and Microsoft that working on a super small team is really fun. You can just move way faster, not sit in meetings all the time.

So now Gumloop is this it used to be way uglier, but it's this workflow automation tool that a bunch of really large companies are using. So I thought I could go over how we approach hiring, internal operations, and then team culture.

These are things that we talk a lot about internally, my co-founder and I. I did want to put a disclaimer here. I don't actually know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to figure out if we're just getting lucky over and over or if our approaches are actually working, but take everything I say with a grain of salt because it could be totally off base and it might ruin your company if you do what I do.

So the three things that we try to do internally when we approach hiring are be super, super picky, which is painful most of the time, product-led hiring, buzzword that we've been trying to coin, and then making time to work together, which I'll explain in a second.

But this is a screenshot from the co-founder of Instacart who ended up investing in our company, and we would ask him for advice because he scaled a large company before, running candidates by him. And one time I asked him, I sent him a candidate that I thought was pretty good.

This was his only reply. He tends to write very short emails, but emphasizing that you shouldn't lower the bar. If you aren't extremely excited about someone, like if it's not a no-brainer, you shouldn't even consider hiring them. So we've done hundreds of interviews and tons of work trials, which I'll explain in a second.

But if you're going to be a super small team, every person needs to be absolutely exceptional, which oftentimes makes investors of yours confused because you're still such a small team and they gave you so much money to scale, but you have to kind of be really thorough with your screening and then also really confident in every single person you hire.

We've been trying to coin this term of product-led hiring. So two of our customers ended up quitting their jobs to join the team, and that was one of the easiest decisions we've made in terms of hiring because they already loved the product.

They had a ton of insight into how it could be used in a business. So our customer from Instacart, the one who originally found us and brought us into the company, he ended up quitting and joining us, and now he does a lot of our enterprise relationships and working with our larger customers.

And then this screenshot is our head of education and community. He was at Webflow before, but had a Zapier course and a ton of automation workshops that he was selling, and then found Gumloop and got super excited. So that was a no-brainer.

But I think if you can focus on making a really great product that obviously happens to be accessible to people who you want to hire, there's a bit of luck involved there, but it helps with the hiring process because they know exactly what you do.

You don't have to inspire them to join the team. They want to join on their own. And then making time to work together. So I think this is only hopefully this video plays.

Yeah, OK. This is only really possible if you have a really small team, but we do this thing where we rent Airbnbs and we just go hack together for like four days at a time. We make like three weeks of progress in a couple of days.

But the two people sitting on the left there are actually work trials. They were interviewing at the time, but we brought them with us to Yosemite to just hack. And I think doing this really intentional sort of working together period is the only way you'll actually know if you want to work with someone.

So we always bring people into work trials. They are on the team for several days as if they already joined the company. And then by the end, we're totally confident whether this is theright fit or not. And we've done way too many of these, honestly, but it's helped us make sure that everyone on the team is exceptional.

Another thing we try to do in terms of operations, I mean, there's three things here. We have almost no meetings, purposefully so. I try to just let people build. I hired great people, so my plan is to give them the space to build, which is easier said than done.

And then we automate everything internally, which is kind of a Gumloop self-plug. But yeah, in terms of our calendars, my calendar is always insane because we're talking to customers or I'm talking to customers. And I flew back from New York this morning, for example, because I was working with customers in person.

But everyone else's calendar should ideally be totally blank. We try to just give everyone deep focus time. If you're an engineer and we hired you to build exceptional products, we should let you do that, not make you talk about building exceptional product for five hours every day.

I think that's only possible if you have a really small team because normally you'll have like five people on a project. You'll have to sync and kind of agree on the terms before you even start working, and that just leads to kind of slowness everywhere.

So

also, letting people build. So I used to be really involved in every aspect of every feature we shipped, but now that we've hired exceptional people who are all better than I am at basically everything, all I do is kind of like inspire, or I try to inspire what the features we should build are.

So I'll make these really stupid descriptions of the features that I think we should build based on talking to customers, and then I just let people do their thing. So that's kind of like only possible if you hire great people, but once you do, you can really just take a back seat and give them the space to be exceptional.

And then automate everything you can. So this is our internal Gumloop instance. We automate basically every part of the business as much as we can, and if there's something we can't automate, then we build features on Gumloop to let us automate it.

So before every meeting, we have a deep research report that tells us everything we need to know about the customer, not just their outward-facing information, but also how they're currently using our product. Are they a power user or not?

What features are they using? So we're totally informed going into the meeting. Every time someone interesting signs up, we get notified what they're doing on the platform and also an email drops into my inbox so I can reach out to them, hop on a call, and talk about why they made that free account.

That's led to a ton of our growth. We have an AI chatbot on the platform, for example, that gets like 50,000 messages a day. But we have a Gumloop workflow that reads the chats with the chatbot so that it can tell us what people are confused about, and then we use that to inform our product decisions.

So a lot of these little tasks in the company would have been someone's role or taking up like three or four hours of their day, but now we use our own product to automate everything. So also, a lot of luck involved.

You can be a small team if you are an automation company, but if you use Gumloop, maybe you guys could be more efficient. That's the plug. Allright. So culture-wise, I think this is the most important thing. It's impossible to talk about having a really exceptional team if no one's having a good time or they're quitting.

So

I mean, one of the most annoying things I say basically every day when we talk about a feature that a customer is asking for is, what if we built it today? What would that look like? And then it's kind of caught on, and now everyone on the team I mean, first of all, I've said that like 10 times, but they're exceptional and they're really fast-building engineers.

So we often just challenge ourselves. What if we put on a timer for 45 minutes and try to ship this featureright now with Cursor? But this can lead to crazy burnout. If you're always asking, what if we did it today on a Friday night at 8:00 p.m., then people are going to have a bad time.

So you have to be really intentional about making it fun. Like I mentioned, we do these retreats, but we're picking a cool place that I wish my boss would have taken me when I was working at a company before this.

And then we get a bunch of food and do a bunch of fun things. We go rock climbing and biking, and it kind of offsets the intensity of building with such a kind of crazy timeline for every feature.

I don't think anyone would be having fun if we didn't have these really exciting times to look forward to. I also think this is only possible. You can't fit 50 people in an Airbnb, but you can fit 10 pretty comfortably.

And then being really intentional about your company culture is another thing that I'm pretty adamant about. This is our company handbook. It's like a month or two out of date, but basically everything that we say internally, we just put it on a page so that we have to live up to it.

We wanted to kind of hold ourselves accountable for all of the ways we talk about building a company. And this is also one of the things that convinces most of the exceptional people on our team to join or to book that initial call because they read our outward-facing handbook and they know what we're about before they even meet us.

And I'm kind of at the end of I was going to show the video, but cut it a bit short. We are hiring a founding head of growth. So if you know anyone, you can email me there. Like I mentioned, it's a fun time, pretty intense, but hopefully you know someone or you want to join the team and help us scale.

Cool. OK.