Claire Hughes Johnson is known as one of the top operators in Silicon Valley. Claire shares the most interesting lessons and stories from her time as COO of Stripe and as an early senior executive at Google.
We discuss leadership versus management, how to have difficult conversations with members of your team, lessons she's learned from hiring thousands of people over the years, and much more.
Show notes:
Claire’s Book, Scaling People: press.stripe.com/scaling-people
Running an Effective Staff Meeting: • Running an Effective S...
(0:00) Intro
(1:12) Joining Google vs Stripe
(9:20) Hiring tactics at early Google
(14:09) How to beat Stripe in a sales cycle
(14:47) Holding yourself to a high standard
(25:02) Avoid hiring people with a victim mentality
(29:22) Lessons from hiring thousands of employees
(31:21) Org. structure in job interviews
(34:37) Claire's best hires drove her crazy
(37:42) How to avoid groupthink
(41:31) Claire's core operating principles
(48:36) "Say the thing you think you cannot say"
(54:01) The key difference between management and leadership
(59:02) Why leaders can ignore the golden rule
(1:03:31) Why startups should go light on titles
(1:12:06) The biggest problem with mission statements
(1:19:27) Why perfectionism harms startups
(1:24:08) It's okay to disappoint people at a rate they can absorb
(1:30:37) Tips for motivating your team
(1:37:33) Learnings from being on Hallmark's board
(1:43:08) What makes the Stripe Co-Founders so special?
(1:45:38) Family rules: you pack it, you carry it
Video Note:
Unfortunately, we experienced a syncing issue in post-production affecting Claire's video / audio sync starting around minute 56. We strive hard to avoid these types of production mistakes and apologize for the miss. For this episode, we've made the fix on Spotify for anyone interested in listening with video: open.spotify.com/episode/4kNv...
Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky
Produced: Rashad Assir
Executive Producer: Josh Machiz
Music: Griff Lawson
🎙 Listen to the show
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb...
Google Podcasts: podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0...
🎥 Subscribe on KZfaq: / @theloganbartlettshow
Follow on Socials
📸 Instagram - / theloganbartlettshow
🐦 Twitter - / loganbartshow
🎬 Clips on TikTok - / theloganbartlettshow
About the Show
Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.