This is really amazing, I love these kind of stories. I wish for everyone would happen as such. And so you grew from what number into what number of employees?

So I think when we started we were maybe 7 or 5 people, around that, and then I think within the first year we were I guess 30 people. I guess important to note that 30 people of which 3 were in Berlin and then we already started opening an office in China, in Shenzhen, so we started scaling very fast and across all the different regions and so on, and then shortly after another year we were 150 people across three locations and also by that time we were part of a larger Shopify organization. But Oberlo grew fast within the first year and a half, to different locations and in different teams.

And after how many years from launching your product you got acquired by Shopify?

Well, again that happened super fast. We were less than a year, maybe 11 months old when we got approached by Shopify and then they said, hey guys, you want to work with us? We of course said okay, well, this is probably one of the coolest companies. So we of course want to work with you and then we decided to sell and then we sold the company shortly after so we were barely one year old, I mean everything happened so fast. We went from nothing, totally irrelevant small team in Lithuania and Vilnius, 5-7 people, to within a year being acquired by one of the largest e-commerce brands and having offices in China and Berlin, and everywhere else so it was super fast and I think by the way I guess this is why it might be useful for our learnings. Might be useful for listeners of this podcast because we went really from zero, from knowing nothing and having no experience and having nothing, no momentum, to actually being part of a massive company within a year and in that process we made every possible mistake and learned a lot and had to figure out how to make these things work. So tons of learnings and super happy to share some of it.

Thank you very much for participating and then sharing your learnings. So what could you emphasize? What was maybe not the biggest but the one which you learned most from?

So I think the problem is the amount of mistakes that we made and they are all consequentially in their own right. I thought that it's instead of focusing on individual mistakes it's more important to recognize the type of mistakes that you make at the different stages and so I wrote down some of the thoughts with some of the examples and I thought maybe I'll just go through that. So when we initially started and I think that happens to all of the companies that start growing - when you start hiring outside of your immediate network, outside of your friends you get a good impression of people coming from big companies or big tech companies. If you hear an engineer from Facebook or an engineer from Google then that makes an immediate impression on you and you think okay that necessarily means an amazing engineer because there are no bad engineers at Google. When we initially got candidate or applicants from booking.com and somewhere else we thought okay, gosh these people, they must know everything like they've seen everything, they know how big companies work like how's a successful tech startups work. So if we hire them, they're going to change everything like this person is the smartest I've ever seen or ever talk. But more often than not, in our own experience, you have inverted correlation with the quality and the name, right? I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, you have to admit that there are a lot of mediocre people in large companies because it's so much easier to fly under the radar in large companies, right? So you just don't fight with anyone and you're fine. And second, talented people have hard times having real impact in big companies. Because of the dependencies and so on and also it's a different ballgame in the large companies, you are dependent. It's a lot about communication, about politics, about positioning yourself or your project. So it's a different breed. Your expectations that there is someone super experienced is not necessarily true. I think you have to be super careful with hiring big names and again more often than not this will not work out as you expect.

Not to be blinded by a company brand, right?

Exactly, this is a hallow effect, right? You get impressed by that, but you have to go way beyond that point and not just a good impression, right? And I think then the second one which is a very related point is understanding that a candidate's profile or their experience or their track record matches what you need. So let's assume that you were correct in identifying a talented person so they did have an impact on their company. Maybe they worked on a project that changed everything for the company or they came in and they fixed the whole marketing and that company became super successful. But it's not enough to just hire a great marketing leader and think that now it's going to be the same for your company. You have to question what kind of marketing they were doing, and what were their budgets. What was the team and so on and do you have the same thing, if their experiences are in content and SEO and affiliate network-based product it's a different breed and they likely not going to have any impact. And we had a fairly almost a comical situation where we hired, we had the executive search company and they found someone super senior and just spot on the perfect fit for us and then I met that person, I spent a lot of time chatting with them and I thought, okay this is too good to be true, and then we hired him and he was very smart, but the problem was that in the previous company he had a team of 200 people and he had the whole supporting infrastructure. He had the systems and everything so he was overlooking everything from 30,000 feet and what we needed was someone being in the weeds and figuring out and doing things. We didn't ask all of questions and we thought, okay, this is a decent hire, a very talented person with a track record but their profile, their work ethics, and everything didn't match our needs and I think this is also a very common mistake of all of the early-stage startups -  just going for track record and going for names.

Yeah I totally agree. Sometimes it's very difficult to decide, because you have to make some exceptions, right? There cannot be an ideal profile for your company and you cannot ask all the questions in the very beginning, right? Because you don't know all the questions yet. Maybe after the failure you know better, but still. So how to make the exceptions in the right way, maybe the sector does not matter so much, but what characteristics or requirements you have to be very strict about?

I think it's more important to be aware of it. It's not necessarily that if they haven't done content marketing that they won't be able to do content marketing or won't be able to build a team which does that. So I think it's fine, it's more of you getting blindsided by something that on paper everything looks great, but then you realize that actually your setup maybe is a bit different. So I think it's not necessarily a hard rule that you cannot breach but it's very good to be aware of that, really trying to understand, will this person be successful in my setting and my environment. And that's again related with the first point - if you're coming from a large company, this skill set that is required is totally different from what you need in a very small startup. So I think just being very aware of that.

That's why I actually like score cards, where you basically list the accountabilities for that position needed to be occupied and responsible for and you interview a candidate in a way to understand whether the person will be capable to be accountable for that or not. So then I believe it's easier to check if the expectations match on both sides. So it's even easier to interview instead of putting the qualifications you need to put the tick on.

True, and also going really deeper into their experience. So sometimes you can ask a question, have you done this or that, or what was the most impactful project you worked on, or whatever and then they can explain something, that okay we did this or that and had this effect and so on. But if you really delve deeper into what they specifically have done in that project it might be that their contribution to that wasn't that great. So again I think it is important to pay a lot of attention to this.

Okay, what were the other learnings you had?

So I guess these two first things were a very common mistakes, clear mistakes that you do in the very early stage. Later on, when we started sort of growing a bit and increasing the funnel of the applicants or just receiving more applications and spending maybe a bit more time or money or resources advertising our positions. We started getting lots of applications from all over the world and it's a bit hard to admit, but I think I wasn't really fighting all of the internal biases, good enough and very soon I realized that because of all of the low quality applications mostly coming from large countries like India or Pakistan, or somewhere from South America, very quickly started just automatically disregarding it. So if it's coming from there must be noise, I discard it and look for something else and then we hired at some point a CTO, and then he started going for all of these applications and it was surprising how many brilliant engineers and product people he found in that batch. So yes, just because of the share volumes you get a lot of noise but there are a lot of signal or a lot of perfectly talented people in that batch. I mean it's terrible that you are denying an opportunity for someone because of your biases it just because the country, or gender or whatever that is, but you're also just losing an opportunity to hire a really talented person and for you it all comes down to who you hire.If you have to do everything that it takes to find these hidden talented person. So if that means going through 500 applications then so be it. You have to go through 500 applications and find them and at some point we had 70 people in our Berlin office. We had 2 germans and all of them were coming either from South America or from all over the world and we were bringing so many talented brilliant people and when I realized how stupid that whole situation was, it's even tough to remember this but really fight your biases because no matter how much noise are there, there is signal.

This is really interesting and I believe this is a very valuable advice, because it is true - most of us if we notice that the quality of most of the candidates are poor, we go to another country and we stop checking, right? But  we have to commit and to review everything we receive and just then to decide on whether to to look for candidates in that country or not. So from how many countries are there people at Shopify, at this Berlin office, for example?

It would be hard to tell but a lot, I mean, I don't want to make a mistake but my guess would be 70 people and maybe 15 or 20 nationalities, like it is so random. Because you go through all of the applications and you find good people from everywhere and then it's just a matter of process to bring them in and again that was Pre-Covid so we were bringing everyone in. Right now it's even easier, right? You can find anyone and through the external and employer record platform you can hire anyone, anywhere. So that's even easier and more relevant right now.

And how is this diversity? How was it working? Was everything fluent or did you face any challenges?

It's not fluent, because it's very difficult to fight your biases. Because not all of the biases you really know and recognize, there are so many unconscious biases that are there and if you look into the numbers, gender split or nationalities split or a race split - it's still not great and it wasn't great with Oberlo, it's still not great at Shopify. It's important that you are making steps into the right direction and actually trying to change something. There are now a lot of good tools and great initiatives that hide let's say the nationality or the picture or the name, so you are sort of valuating the actual facts. If someone helps you fight your own biases, that's great also. So sometimes for a very specific role or a skill set it might be a very limited pool that you're choosing from, but making sure that you have a very diverse candidate pool is super important.

Yeah, of course. If there's language skills, it's not so easy to be diverse then, but for other things I I totally agree. How are you checking the background of people and the suitability for the position then?

I think it depends a bit on the seniority level. Let's say, junior to mid-level people. You can chat with them, look into their track record, have reference calls and all of the standard stuff and you can pretty much figure stuff out I think where it gets difficult and I had this as one of the issues with the hiring or one of the challenges, later on, is when you start, when you grow and then you start hiring senior people because hiring senior people is like a different, totally different challenge because they know exactly how to sell themselves. They know what you're looking for. They know what they need to tell.  It's so difficult to recognize who is who. And one thing that I think helped me a lot is spending or taking your time with that person; so not rushing not making this official like what you've done. But more of okay, let's go for dinner. Let's hop on the call and you start chatting about the market and how they see things, and maybe you tell them your plans and then they give you feedback, and then you see if they are curious if they are asking questions if they have interesting insights that you haven't thought of. And so on so the more senior people, the less you have to follow the standard process I think  that's one way to go in and I think there are people where you meet them and you start chatting and it feels like they're talking the same language. And they have interest and you learn a ton in an hour or 2-hour dinner and so on. So with the senior people, building relationships take your time and make sure that you don't make a mistake.

Okay, this is really great I believe, it's even difficult to check the references, right? Because if it's very senior person, they usually have very good and strong network or relationships and it's not easy then to find the information you're looking for. So just to talk and to see, how is the communication and whether the person can bring something is addition. It's a great thing and I wonder how many startup founders or C- level managers actually do that because usually they just follow the usual procedures, right? As what you do with the less senior people.

Yeah, exactly. And I think it's important to remember that the cost of a bad hire at the leadership position is just so much higher than than the mid-level so you have to be extra careful. And good potential hire, they will want to do the same, they will want to spend time with you. They will want to understand what is this company and who are you and so on. So if they want to go through the process really quick and so on that's maybe one of the red flags.

I actually had these cases myself - when the candidate is super in a rush and pushing you to make the decision to hire or not . There is no time to check the references and everything, but the candidate also has to decide whether accept your offer or maybe others and then you rush too much and you see that I would have better check those references and prolong that time.

Yeah, and actually we had the internal saying -  it's important to say and to accept the fact that you're going to make so many mistakes and statistically you're going to make probably more mistakes than the good hires; odds are stacked against you. You're going to hire a whole bunch of very bad or mediocre people and so on so it's very difficult to hire good people, obviously with experience the chances are increasing but still I mean it's going to be fifty-fifty or something like that. So one thing that we were saying internally is if it's not "hell yeah!", then it's no. If you are not going crazy about the candidate, if on paper it looks good, but the gut feeling is that something is off and so on, if you're not going crazy then you don't hire. So I think that's one thing, because again the cost of a bad hire is so much higher than just waiting for a bit more; And then the second thing is during the probation period or the first months or for first half year it should be your honeymoon so everything should be absolutely perfect, right? For sure things will start popping up later on. The rough edges and whatever, but the first months should be really perfect, not saying that they'll have the impact immediately but everything should look totally on track and so on. And if it's not the case then I think it's better to call it a day, and it's not too bad for the person, not too bad for you and then you go back. So I mean just having confidence when making a call and then if something doesn't feel right just calling a day as soon as possible.

What I noticed is that many people tend to do their best during the probation period, right? And after the probation period sometimes they kind of relax and then maybe do more mistakes and be not so much motivated or something like this. I believe that even if it's still the probation period and you see that the person lacks motivation, there's no way that it will be better after the probation period, right? So you have to be very careful and not so desperate to believe that maybe later, because "now it's too stressful".

It's a terrible position to be in, but what naturally happens is that you start negotiating with yourself. You say, okay, maybe I didn't do a good job with onboarding. Maybe it's this or that, so you start because it's tough to let someone go. It's very hard mentally so you naturally start postponing that decision. You start negotiating with yourself. That's why I think before you even start hiring, if you have any indication that this is not a totally perfect hire, then we sit and figure out what to do.

Yeah, I agree. So what are the other learnings?

I think that's pretty much it. I think one maybe the last small piece, which I hope is obvious but still worth mentioning is that when you're growing, there will be structures around you and around the processes and around the hiring process as well, a talent acquisition team or someone doing sourcing and so on and I think at some point the whole hiring process sort of gets decoupled from actual hiring managers and I think that's very dangerous and that's where like companies become super complacent and ultimately fail. So I think if you are a hiring manager,  regardless of where in the company you are, you are responsible for the hire. You're responsible for hiring process.You're responsible for all of the leads that you get, you're responsible for sourcing process. If you need to make a a shortcut, you make a shortcut if you need to expedite things if you need to change something - it's ultimately you, all of the teams around you all of the processes. It's only here to support you. If you have a bad hire - that's your problem,  if you don't have any hire - that's your problem right? If you don't have anyone at the top of the funnel of the hiring food chain then it's your problem. So I think it was for me very evident, when we joined Shopify because there was so much structure and process there that I couldn't even be involved for the first month of the candidates process or something and it was very tough and ultimately we didn't control what we were getting and what we were hiring and so on or to some extent right? So I think this is a very natural tendency -  it happens everywhere. You can't avoid that but you have to be very aware and very quick to respond and really just so in the process.

I think this is the best what recruiters would like to hear, because hiring managers involvement into the whole recruitment process is one of the most important thing in the process and if hiring managers spend some time even help with looking at the candidate profiles, better understand their expectations and leave the comments after interviews. That is not so difficult to do, but it gives a lot of benefit here.

I think some hiring managers think, okay, you're responsible for talent acquisition. So bring the best talent, right? But even for the talent or for people being hired right? It's one thing talking with someone who you're going to be reporting to, understanding the business needs, understanding all of the context and everything is so much more valuable than hiring with the talent acquisition person, right? Talent acquisition can give you a high level presentation, but selling on the vision, selling on the idea ultimately lies on the shoulders of the hiring manager.

Yeah, exactly, one thing is the representation from the company to a candidate and that direct communication from the very beginning,  from basically selling the job opening to candidates. And another thing is that of course a recruiter might understand or imagine what are the expectations. But how another person could make the decision and especially a person not working in your field? It's too complicated and then it's only a game basically and you're checking. So yeah, it's especially important and the other question I wanted to ask you because I wouldn't say that so many failures but I assume there should be because you grew very fast and you hired many people in a very short period of time. So how to still be motivated or  believe in some success if you hire and you fail? So how do you manage to be strong?

It's a perfect question; It's a question of balance. So if you occasionally happen to hire someone who's really decent then that helps your mental state, right? If you're only hiring people and then firing them then that's a problem right? Statistically this is likely what's going to happen because you're going to make mistakes. But in our case, yes, we made tons of mistakes in the very beginning and it was very painful and also it weighed on you mentally, on the rest of the team because they see people coming and going so it was very tough. It creates some sort of insecurity feeling among the team, but luckily we managed to hire some really strong people and they made a massive impact on the company they came in and they changed things and they owned different areas of the operations or the company and then people saw different examples of a failed attempt to hire someone and a successful one and then you ultimately understand that, Okay, this is a balance but  again I think another important point is just staying open and humane and it's not that you are hiring and firing that sounds terrible. It's a mutual agreement -  someone believes in your company and you believe in that person and then it's not necessarily that the person is not talented or whatever it might be just the wrong setting. Maybe you can't give them what they need to be efficient and so on so just sitting down and saying okay well what do you think, is something off here, something is not working. Let's try this or that or maybe it's just not the match so just be open about it.

Exactly it's not only a hiring manager's decision. It's a candidate's decision too. Maybe there was not enough information from one or another side and nothing is so wrong about it. The last question I have it's being desperatem, you mentioned that it's better not to be and especially if there's more senior role. So it's better to invest even more time into the process. But what if you need a person right now? Then you're desperate in having a manager or a senior specialist and you are desperate because you're working way too much. How not to be desperate and not to rush?

So this feeling if you're growing never changes. You're always desperate. You always have gaps, you need more people, you need more hands. You need more skill sets and so on so this never changes, just the fallacy that like you will arrive at that point where now you're going to have like a perfect team and everything's going to be fine now. So this doesn't change. Second is it's better to perhaps use the existing resources, incentivize them and fill in these gaps before not rush and not make a mistake and I don't know if I can say this on the podcast, but I say it anyways, it's we say, it's better to have a hole than an asshole in the company. It applies more to just like bad hires in terms of the attitude. But this applies more broadly right? It's better to have a gap in what you need rather than someone who's not qualified to fill in that gap. You're not gonna solve the problem and you're just gonna add additional problem on the problems that you already have. So I think that desperation is not a good indication to rush and make more mistakes.

Okay, this is a good example, I will always remember this one in order to not to be desperate. Okay, great. So thank you Andrius so much for your time and for sharing your story. And thank you to all the listeners, for more podcast, please visit jobRely.com

Thank you for having me.