AV2 | Articulating Team Values – Velocity vs. Speed | Kartick Narayan, Founder & CEO, Kilo

As a first-time founder, Kartick reflects on optimising for speed, how his leadership principles have evolved, and designing a hiring process that ensures new hires are aligned with Kilo’s company values.

Discussion Topics: Articulating Team Values – Velocity vs. Speed

• The first hires
• Developing shared values
• Aiming for velocity, not speed
• Screening for values
• Establishing a hiring process to avoid mistakes
• Mistakes with the co-founder
• Keeping the first few hires
• Why you should join Kilo

Transcript: Articulating Team Values – Velocity vs. Speed

Hau Ly: Hi everyone, we’re your hosts Adrian and Hau and welcome back to AVV Founders and Friends Podcast Season one. And today we’re here with a very special guest, Kartick Narayan, founder and CEO of Kilo. Kartick, we’d love to hear you introduce a little bit about Kilo to our audience.

Kartick Narayan: Thank you Hau and thank you, Adrian for inviting me to be on your podcast. Kilo is a company that’s based in Vietnam. We are a B2B e-commerce company that connects wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers with retailers with a mission to bring millions of traditional businesses online. This is the first time I am running a startup, a tech startup. It’s been a fantastic journey so far. A lot of lessons learned both about running businesses and myself.

Adrian Latortue: Okay, awesome. Tell us a little bit more about the journey, kind of what led you onto the road to Kilo, you were with a few big companies before Coupang, and also Tiki. But what led you to eventually do a Kilo?

Kartick Narayan: Sure. I mean, just a little bit of background, you know, I started my career at Amazon, pretty early on in Seattle. I was part of two very successful business units, marketplace, business unit, and Amazon’s advertising business. And I do think that the focus on metrics and scaling, and having good leadership principles, pays off long term, in a big way. So a lot of principles that I applied today at work are things that I picked up at Amazon. I feel very lucky and blessed to have had that experience early on in my career. From Amazon, I moved around a lot. I’ve been in Vietnam now for about four years. And Adrian, as you correctly pointed out, I was with Coupang in South Korea, before moving to Vietnam. So after Coupang, I came to Tiki which was a smaller scale company that I have worked with in the past. And what I really got excited about is the potential and the potential for customers to have a better experience, particularly when they transact online. I started Kilo, somewhat deliberately. So I wanted to build a product and an experience that does not just marginally better for customers, but something that’s 100 times better. And so with that in mind, we ran a few tests, hired some people and I think we’re making really good progress towards achieving that goal of building that something that’s 100 times better.

Adrian Latortue: So Kilo is a hot company in the market. I say this, because every single investor that comes to town is looking to meet with you. There’s a lot of excitement about what you’re building, the growth, the scale, and the pace at which you’re doing it. So what I want to learn more about is the team that is driving all of the success and growth at Kilo and the changes that you’re making in a market. So let’s start at the beginning. Who were your first three hires at Kilo?

Kartick Narayan: My first three hires at Kilo, an engineer, a product leader, and a leader to handle finance and accounting. And as I say that, what comes to mind is all three of them are still here, and they are thriving, very successful. So I’m especially proud of the fact that they’re very successful, and they are quite happy.

Adrian Latortue: So, tell us a little bit more about your first three hires, and how did you meet them kind of what stood out to you about them.

Kartick Narayan: Sure. So, for me, the thing that I realised is, I think skills are the skills, but I have a particular way of working and I really wanted to form a team that aligned with the same values as I had. And so it’s a group of people that is a mix of people that I met when I was in Vietnam, as well as people that I’ve been working with for many, many years. So for example, I had a product is somebody that I worked with for the past eight years at Tiki at Coupang, even in the US. One of our first engineers that came on board started with us part time, but he’s still here, you know, working on a bunch of interesting stuff, his role has grown larger and larger. The fantastic thing about him is the fact that not only is he technically savvy, but he’s got an extreme sense of ownership, which means that very proactive in building what customers want, clearing technical debt, being scrappy where possible, being frugal. So all of these values that we hold very dearly, he operates that way, day in and day out. And lastly, our head of finance, and accounting wears multiple hats in the company. She approached us very early on saying that she wanted to work in a tech company, she’s got a fantastic background, in public accounting, and finance. That resonated well with me, because I spent a number of years of my career in finance, and business operations, at Coupang and Amazon, etc. And I always think that finance should have a seat at the table for every decision that we make. All of these individuals certainly have a rich resume, they have brand names, they’ve got great degrees, they’ve gotten multinational work experience. But the thing I keep going back to is the fact that our values and mindsets are very, very similar. So it’s a great mix of people that I’ve known for a long time that know each other’s sort of styles of working, as well as some new talent that’s come into the company, who’s taught me a lot about living, working, operating in Vietnam.

Adrian Latortue: Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a testament not only to the kind of the people you selected, but also the strength of the culture, and the company and the values which you aligned on. Going back to those values were these things that were immediately apparent, or were they things that you were able to test for over time? How did you find that alignment I guess?

Kartick Narayan: Sure. I mean, there are some things that I suppose that I picked up from my time working at Amazon and Coupang and other companies. You know, for example, one of our values is customer focus, and I think Amazon calls it customer obsession. The reason is, because, and I’m going to misquote Jeff Bezos here, but he says something like, in the long term customer obsession, and business success, or business growth cannot be divergent functions, you know, they have to converge over time. So I thought that was pretty powerful. So when we sit down and think about working on something, we do want to make sure that whatever we’re building is not just incrementally better for the customer, but it’s 100 times better, and so we want to stand out in that respect, and we want to make sure that everybody that that’s on the team is okay to make short term trade-offs, whether it’s margin or revenue for a better customer experience. So that’s one of our values.

The other ones that we talk about a lot are integrity, and ownership. Integrity is very simple. We expect people to not only do the right thing, but also to do as they say, I think that’s also very important, because we’re moving with so much velocity, we don’t have the time building mechanisms to follow up with people. So if someone’s going to say that they’re going to do something, they’ve got to do it. So integrity is another sort of leadership principle that we talk about a lot internally. And then lastly, we talk about ownership. Ownership is again, very simple. If you see something broken, if you see opportunities for improvement, just dig in and fix it. And I can say that at Kilo each one of these leadership principles I see numerous examples of that day in and day out. And that’s sort of the most gratifying thing for me as a founder to take a step back and look at the team, and how they operate and sort of read between the lines and look at how each one of these leadership principles embodied themselves. We incorporate these leadership principles into everything, how we interview candidates, how we promote people, how we coach people. So it’s part of our DNA, it’s simply a part of our DNA.

One of the things that is evolving is around resourcefulness and velocity. The thing that I’m discovering as the team gets bigger and more mature, is, you know, teams extremely resourceful. Now, for example, our head of technology, he also is very familiar with regulations, licences and permits of how to operate in Vietnam. So he’s been able to clear a lot of bearers. Our head of product, loves working on trucks and fixing trucks. So, soon you will see a few trucks, Kilo branded trucks running around, because our head of product was able to go and get a great deal on used trucks. And I can give you 1000 examples like that. So the resourcefulness that the team has, is great. And I would say that that’s probably one of the emerging sort of principles that we have internally at Kilos is how resourceful the team can be.

Lastly, I always used to talk about speed as one of the ways we should operate. But I think speed is incorrect. So I’ve corrected it recently to say that we want to operate with velocity. Speed is just moving in a direction very quickly. But velocity is to move in the right direction very quickly. So as our business gets more complex and the organisation gets bigger, I think it’s important to make that distinction and say that we want to operate with the right velocity, not just with the right speed. So those are the five things we have spent a little bit of time thinking about that.

Adrian Latortue: No, that’s awesome. It’s really comprehensive, too. It sounds like the first three hires that you made kind of already embodied those and then you started talking about resourcefulness and velocity. I’m curious how those first three hires started embodying that or those values that kind of just developed over time as the team grew.

Kartick Narayan: I think in the very early stages for those three hires, that’s how they live, and that’s how they work. And so we didn’t actually spend the effort to say, hey, you know, I believe in ownership, do you believe in it as much as I do? And should this be one of our leadership principles? It was a very simple exercise of writing down the leadership principles and saying, these are our leadership principles and everybody sort of saying, Yep, thumbs up, that’s how we work. Makes sense. Let’s use this as a framework for how we operate. So very little sort of alignment needed to be had with early hires. You know, it was just sort of a composition of who we were. So I guess that’s how we landed on those three leadership principles early on.

Adrian Latortue: I love the specificity and just the precision, there’s a deeper meaning that you get with this rigour around the language that you use for the values because they’re manifested in each of these individuals and across a wider team in very different ways, and to kind of find that alignment it’s very tight, very tight alignment early on, then that’s really, really powerful.

Hau Ly: Yeah. Since we’re talking about hiring, I would love to maybe dive a little deeper into how you screen your initial hires for these values that you’ve identified. Another question that I have in mind is, I’d love to understand how much time you spend on hiring, let’s say in the first 6 to 12 months of your business, because as I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, I see that a lot of experienced entrepreneurs, they really put hiring on the top of their priority list. And for some that are less experienced, maybe not so. So I’d love to understand the thinking behind that. So those are the two questions that I have in mind.

Kartick Narayan: Got it. Just to play that back to how much time did I spend in the initial days, let’s say the first six months or so on hiring and what is our hiring framework and how we apply our leadership principles to hiring so in the beginning and even now, I do spend a lot of my time talking to potential candidates, you know, the best people are passive. The best people are very deliberate about their career choices, and they’re happy where they are. But it’s my responsibility and I have to own bringing the story and the vision and get them excited about Kilo. And so, of course, I don’t spend as much time now as I used to. But if I were to quantify it in the beginning, I probably would spend 50% of my time, seven days a week, talking to candidates and trying to get people to be excited about Kilo. Some of it was skill based conversations, but really evolved around the mind-set and they were soft skills, knowing somebody’s background, what gets them excited, what irritates them. So those are some of the things that were very important for me to gauge and there still are.

So in the beginning, it was about 50%. Despite that we did make hiring mistakes, very painful mistakes, expensive mistakes, of hiring the wrong people, and having to let them go, or they leave the company. And so we have to really sit down and have an honest conversation and own up to those mistakes and say, Look, you know, we’ve got to fix it. And the reason for us making hiring mistakes is because I didn’t take the time to put a good framework around a process, like, how should we build the pipeline once somebody gets to Kilo, what do I need to do to make sure that they are successful in the first week, first month, first year, and also around building process. It’s just sort of having a framework on how to interview candidates. So we’ve learned a lot. And now to answer your second question, how do we hire, so having these leadership principles that I talked to you about earlier, is great, but then we actually have mechanisms to make sure that we use those leadership principles in our interview process. So I’ll lay out the process for you. The process is very simple. We build a pipeline; the pipeline can come from me or others or our recruiter. From there, there’s a recruiting screen, after the recruiting screen if the candidate is interested in moving the process forward, and we’re interested in moving the process forward we send them a small sort of brochure, if you will about Kilo, you know, what is the team doing, why are we doing what we’re doing, why they should come work here, and even a link to download our app and play with our app and get a touch and feel for our product. From there, what happens is, there’s a half an hour skill based phone screen with the hiring manager, sort of very rapid fire, can they problem solve. After that, if they pass the hiring manager phone screen, they come in for an in-house interview, that there’s between three and four people and it’s not a panel, it’s an individual 60 minute in person interview.

And so what we do is each interviewer is assigned a core value. So let’s say, I had a product is going to go interview a candidate for operations. The core value they’re assigned is customer obsession. So all the questions, all the problem solving, everything is focused around customer obsession. So then, there’s no duplicate questions. So there’s no sort of overlap between one interviewer to the other. We have recently introduced something called the bar raiser, which is a person that is an expert at interviewing and embodies the leadership principles really well is also a part of the interview loop and they check only for cultural fit. They also have veto rights. So let’s say there’s four people in the interview, including the bar raiser, three people can say we’re inclined if the bar raiser says no, then we don’t hire the candidate. So we’re testing that, it’s working reasonably well. No sort of big controversy so far. But having those mechanisms has certainly helped. Everybody’s going to write their feedback down in air table, we do a debrief of the interview with the recruiter as quickly as possible after the interview ends. And that conversation is also very much geared around what’s your decision, why, what questions did you ask, and there’s a healthy debate.

So it’s time that I have learned I have a very high ROI not doing so has in the past resulted in us being unhappy or the candidate being unhappy when they get here. So one of the big lessons learned is to invest time in proper mechanisms, especially on hiring. So that’s one. The thing that I also didn’t talk about was on our onboarding process. So if you come in as an engineer, the onboarding process is pretty amazing I would say. It’s a very smooth ramp, everything is documented. Some of the examples I can think of our engineers are pushing code into production in their first week. So that can only happen if they know where to access the information, who to talk to and where to go for documentation, and also understand who the stakeholders are. So we’ve also put in a significant amount of time and resources around onboarding, including all of that what I mentioned above, but also setting sort of targets, right setting sort of goalposts to say, you know that you’re doing well, if you hit this milestone in the first 30 days, you know you’re doing really well, if you hit these two milestones in the next 60 days. So I think that that’s also extremely important. And our hiring managers do a great job of making sure that candidates have that experience in the first two months.

Hau Ly: That’s awesome. I actually see quite a number of similarities between Kios hiring process and our own hiring process.

Kartick Narayan: Awesome.

Hau Ly: So yeah, definitely you saw me nodding along, but in a smiley, that’s because of that. You mentioned hiring mistakes. And one of the mistakes that you shared with us earlier was bringing on a co-founder that eventually didn’t work out, and you highlighted the lesson there, which was less emphasis on looking for, quote, unquote, a complementary mindset, but more similar mindset. And this really is intriguing for me, because as VCs, as investors, when we assess teams, we always just want to look for a team that has complementary skills, knowledge, even personalities, qualities, and so on. So, can you share more about this?

Kartick Narayan: Sure. Yeah, I think it’s worth spending time on that. I think it’s perfectly fine having complementary skills. So, someone is creative, the other person is not maybe as creative, but they have other skills. Someone’s technical, the other person is not technical. That is perfectly fine. What I mean, is complimentary in terms of mindset. So let’s say that, all of us want to move with speed and want to make quick decisions. However, if we have a team member that wants to be more right, than being more fast, we will never get anything done. So that’s the mind-set. The mind-set needs to be similar, you know, it’s okay to be faster than to be right at this stage in the company. And everybody in the company should be okay with that. I’m not saying it’s the right answer. I think if you are building a rocket to go to space, you want to be more right than then to be fast. But you know, we are building a consumer facing product and so for us, the speed of iteration matters a lot. Because the faster we iterate with, the more data we get, the more we learn. So for that to happen, we just need to move fast. And so people that have been very successful at Kilo are the ones that share a similar mindset. So I think the wrong balance is to say, hey, maybe we’re making too many decisions, and we’re going too fast. Let’s bring someone in that can slow us down, that has a different mindset. You know, we’ve done that and that’s been a mistake. So, the lesson is, it’s okay to have complementary hard skills, but the mindset has to be the same.

Hau Ly: Thank you for sharing that. My interpretation of that is that the point here is not to find people who are your exact quotes, there should be complementary, there are things that you would need diversity on. But then there are things that you don’t want to compromise. There are things that you have to be absolutely on the same page about and you should know what that is when you make these initial hires because they have really, really large impacts on your company.

Kartick Narayan: Right.

Adrian Latortue: Were there any things that you reflected on that you felt like you needed to change about yourself after making that mistake. So like beyond the company, but really think about yourself as a founder, especially as a first time founder.

Hau Ly: That’s a really tough question.

Kartick Narayan: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, what I learned about myself is, again, being very stubborn about what values matter to me and ignoring all else. I mean, they can be the most amazing technical minds, but if the value match is not there, then it’s not going to work. So, for me, that’s one. And I guess what I learned, and what I would have done differently is I would have taken more time. I would have taken more time to assess. And in the spirit of moving fast, maybe I moved too fast. And so again, I think, moving at the right velocity, which is moving fast in the right direction, is important. That being said, the way we operate is, right now, at this stage in the company, I do feel like I have four co-founders. I do feel like each one of our VPs embodies that, they embody the fact that they are an owner in the company, they behave that way. You know, they challenge each other and they work together. And so I do feel that we’re on the same page, we operate similarly, people are empowered, and they have the autonomy to make decisions. We don’t have a culture where I say I, as a CEO, or the founder say something and people must comply because of my title, or because of my tenure. That is not at all the case, right? People say no to me, all the time, which is great to see. So I do feel like, each one of our VPs is not just an owner on paper of the company, but they behave that way. So we’ve come quite a ways, from where we were, just a year ago.

Hau Ly: You mentioned that your first three hires, they’re still with you and they’ve actually grown quite a bit and prospered, and their roles in the team have expanded as well. So what would you say are three things that you’ve done, to keep and develop these great hires?

Kartick Narayan: I think the first thing is to be genuine, to be really honest and upfront, and being able to create psychological safety, not just for them to share problems, but also for me to tell them that this is not going well, or this is what I think without being afraid of being perceived as not having all the answers. So creating that environment of psychological safety is important and that can only happen if you’re genuine. So I think that’s number one. Number two is allowing these leaders to make decisions, and taking a longer term view, even if it’s a decision that may be wrong, in my view, it’s allowing them to make those decisions, and then finding a path. So that’s number two. And number three, is my job oftentimes comes down to alignment right across the organisation. So we’ve also built in mechanisms where all teams come together. I talk about our leadership principles, our numbers, what’s going well, what’s not going well, so the managers feel like it’s not only their responsibility to make sure everybody’s pulling in the right direction. So sharing a little bit of that responsibility as well. So I would say those are the three things which are sort of genuine, allowing people to make decisions and allowing them to sort of fail and just being transparent about what’s happening in the company.

Adrian Latortue: Wow, that was deep. I love it. I wish we had more time to talk about all these things. Yes, we can summarise in bullets but these are all topics that can just, you know, they can have their own episode. We can go at length about psychological safety and allowing leaders to make decisions and low cost mistakes. Yes, so many like nuggets of goldenness, and for all the listeners, please rewind, listen over and over and over again because this is the gospel of early stage hiring and being a founder. And Kartick, thank you so much for sharing with authenticity, and really kind of sharing some of your secret sauce, Hau and I really appreciate it and I’m sure that the audience does as well.

So, um, one really important question, and I think you’ve shared a little bit about this, but in 30 seconds, how would you pitch Hau and myself on joining Kilo?

First, I would say, look, our mission in Kilo is to bring millions of traditional businesses online. It’s not about Kilo, it’s about something bigger than us.What we’re doing today is building mechanisms, building process, building products that truly is a hundred times better than the alternative in the market. We are a small team, but we are experienced, intense and it’s a fun and collaborative environment. So if you want to better yourself and better businesses this is a fantastic, fantastic environment to be in. You know, if you put two people, they’ll always wanna sort of aspire to be better than one another. So I think at Kilo there’s a wonderful opportunity to come in and learn and contribute and build both hard and soft skills. We’re growing – I think we’re over 10x year over year. So growth is not a constraint. There’s a lot of great challenging problems to come and solve. So, Adrian and Hau, if you wanna work on something that’s much bigger than the company, much bigger than yourselves, then you should come join us.

Hau Ly: Sweet.

Adrian Latortue: Yeah. Thank you, Kartick. Thank you so much.

Kartick Narayan: Thank you both so much for your great questions and keeping this engaging.

Our Guest: Kartick Narayan

Kartick Narayan is the founder of Kilo, a Vietnam-based company on a mission to bring millions of traditional businesses online by connecting wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers with retailers.