Happy Wednesday,

Did you know that $220B+ in Silicon Valley is influenced by Matt Mochary?

He's mentored the CEOs of Angellist, ClickUp, Coinbase, Notion, OpenAI, OpenSea, Postmates, Reddit, Rippling, and Robinhood.

For example, we all say that Sam Altman is a genius founder.

Sam’s secret? He has a coach:

We went through what he teaches them— here are his most important lessons:

1. Good decision making

2. Conflict resolution

3. Vision and mission

4. Efficient meetings

5. Hiring & firing

1. Decision making

Most founders face a core challenge in obtaining team support for decisions.

Deciding might be simple, but getting the team to care about the decision is harder. Most employees don't feel attached to the final outcome.

Instead, here’s his framework for decision-making:

When you involve people in the decision-making process and value their input, they become more supportive of the final outcome.

The more they feel their ideas matter, the more committed they'll be to the end result.

Let's take an example:

Company A - The manager makes the decision, announces it to the team, and answers any queries the team might have.

This is good for quick decisions. But the team is not invested in the decision.

Did you know…

We’ll create a FREE detailed marketing plan to reach your growth goals (completely unique to your business)

Tell us a little bit about your company, and our marketing experts will put together a detailed plan to hit your growth goals—100% free!

Get your free marketing plan here

Company B - The manager invites the team to a meeting where they discuss the problem together from the beginning. Both the manager and the team share their thoughts and reach a decision through consensus.

Which company would you be in?

Company B's employees would be invested in the decision, and the company would benefit from the collective wisdom of the team.

The only catch is this might require more time. For Company B, the employees are involved.

For company A, the employees are not involved.

2. Conflict Resolution

It is common for employees to experience conflicts when they are unable to share their ideas freely & feel like their opinions are being overlooked.

When teams fail to communicate effectively, it can lead to a lack of trust, ultimately affecting the success of the company.

The solution to this is simple - make people feel heard. How?

Repeat what they have said after they complete speaking.

And ask them if this is what they meant. That's it.

Once you have listened to them, they will listen to you.

Matt's 2-step process for identifying key company issues that need to be solved:

3. Mision and Vision

Matt has a simple question that you can answer to make your mission statement: "Our purpose is to do what for whom?"

The companies Matt has coached have adopted this really well:

@NotionHQ - We're on a mission to make it possible for everyone to shape the tools that shape their lives

@Rippling - We free smart people to work on hard problems

@coinbase - Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world

A vision is like picturing the company's future when it's very successful.

Matt focuses on 4 things while crafting the vision statement:

- Customer - Problem - Solution - Moat

In his book, Matt has shared these questions that will help you make your 10-year vision:

Here are the answers by Matt for his company:

What pain point are they solving:

The uniqueness of their business solution:

His company’s Moat:

Here is the entire doc with his answers:

4) Better Meetings

95% of meetings suck.

They are poorly planned, unproductive & boring. How can you have efficient internal meetings that don't suck:

- have a meeting owner

- have a written agenda

- prewritten topics

- comments before the meeting on the agenda and topics

- post meeting feedback

🆓 Get a Free Detailed Marketing Plan

Tell us a little bit about your company, and our marketing experts will put together a detailed plan to hit your growth goals—100% free!

Get My Free Marketing Plan

We believe that good communication is not verbal only, and good communication is not written only. 3 types of meetings:

5. Hiring and firing

A rule of thumb of Matt:

Spend less time with candidates you don't hire (The first interview call he takes is never longer than 15mins) and more time with candidates you want to hire.

The best talent is usually in full-time jobs and hesitant to leave without another full-time offer.

To evaluate, collect information on their past job performance.

But here is the secret - ask for contacts of all their previous managers.

And interview the managers.

And ask them the most important question: Would you hire this person again? And if they say yes, why?

Another tip: If the person isn't employed full-time, you can hire them on a contract for 1-3 months and see how they perform.

"If you had a professional sports team that wasn’t allowed to let go of any player they added to the team, that team would end up in last place every time."

Matt believes that the most valuable thing about recruiting is learning how to fire well. Here is his firing framework:

Our CEO, Eric Siu, is also a personal fan of a few other things that he does:

- forces his clients to hire a Chief of Staff (Exec Ops)

- traffic lights to indicate how a goal has been trending recently. If a has been 'red' or 'yellow' over a period of time, it must be discussed.

Matt also teaches CEOs about energy audits:

"We all feel like we have limited time, but that’s actually really not the case. What we have is limited energy. And if we start doing things more that raise our energy, we can actually start doing more and more things."

Matt on building a good company culture:

The best learning method according to Matt:

We hope you enjoyed this Deep Dive.

Leave a reply with your thoughts, we love hearing from you.

To your growth!
The Leveling Up Team

P.S. But wait, there's more!

Matt also made a documentary that won 36 international film festival awards.

This is him at the Tribeca Film Festival alongside Robert De Niro after winning the "Best New Documentary Filmmaker" award: