LISNR, a CNBC Top 50 Tech Disruptor two years in a row, doesn’t recruit straight-A students but looks for the folks that got B’s in school. Rodney Williams, LISNR CEO and Co-Founder, is a big believer in this human capital strategy at startups and after maintaining massive growth at the ground-breaking tech company for the last five years, he knows a lot about building the best team to win his markets. Find out more from Rodney about why you should hire B students, why you should reconsider using a search firm to find your next executive, how Jeff Bezos got it right, and more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

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Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.com. Okay. Thank you.
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant [inaudible 00:26:39]. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.com. Okay. Thank you.
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant growth. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.comhttp://lisnr.com/. Okay. Thank you.
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant growth. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.comhttp://lisnr.com/. Okay. Thank you. http://lisnr.com/
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant [inaudible 00:26:39]. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.com. Okay. Thank you.
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant growth. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.comhttp://lisnr.com/. Okay. Thank you.
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant growth. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Rodney Williams is the co-founder and CEO of LISNR, an audio technology company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since the founding of the company in 2012, LISNR’s raised just under $15 million in funding from partners like Intel Capital, Rubicon Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Jump Capital here in Chicago, Progress Ventures and others. They currently have 35 employees across the country and have some of the coolest technology you will ever hear about, which we will kick things off discussing. So, Rodney, we’re excited to learn from you today. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure.
Adam Robinson:	So, Rodney, you were recently named entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young and LISNR’s been named a CNBC top 50 disrupter two years in a row. All kinds of great things going on. Congratulations on your success.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. Thank you. The award’s awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So give us the 30 seconds on LISNR. It is pretty amazing stuff. Tell us what you guys are doing.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. So we actually figured out a way, or created a way, to transmit data using sound that’s inaudible. It can be broadcasted via your phone or it can be received via your standard microphone. And think of it as a secure way to transmit data wirelessly from one device to the next. So it is a true protocol.
Adam Robinson:	So some of the applications for this technology and looking at your solutions authentication you can do audience engagement, all kinds of practical applications using this technology.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I mean, I think what’s gonna be most notable, especially over the next 12 months, it’s everything that’s in close proximity to your device. So that’s using this technology as the key to your house, to your car, or the entry point to your office, as the way you pay for things in store, as the way you personalize your car or even the way you sync and pair a blue tooth device. Those are some of the top areas of business that we have over the next 12 months.
Adam Robinson:	So if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Rodney Williams:	I think LISNR.com is an excellent way, but we actually have an e-book that we’re releasing in about 30 days that’s actually gonna go in really depth. The reality is that we invented a new technology, and the implications of technology are pretty widespread when you think of the new era of connected devices and the ambition or the goal that we have to truly, completely disrupt a way in which we enter our door. So think of access management, to pay for things, that’s payments, connected devices, the way your devices connect and pair. I mean, it’s truly inefficient, and I think we can make a better consumer experience.
Adam Robinson:	So that’s LISNR.comhttp://lisnr.com/http://lisnr.com/. Okay. Thank you. http://lisnr.com/
Rodney Williams:	Yes.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s dive into the people side of your business. Give us a little bit of the origin story. You, business partners, started the business, and it could get to a point where you have to hire actual employees on the payroll. Talk about that first person and when you came to that point and how you moved forward with it.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think that in our story, funding was the accelerator. And that’s what allowed us to go full time and allowed us to then lead to that first hire. I think we essentially hired two people at the same time, and both two people are still with the organization today, which is really powerful five years later. But I think we got a little bit lucky. I don’t necessarily know there was a true hire process. Honestly, what we were needing, it was all need-based. We really needed, I like to call them “a corporate athlete.” That’s a person that can do a financial model. They can pitch. They can sell. They can do marketing. Think of almost like a set of skills that are very, very diverse. I looked within the startup ecosystem. I looked at people that came through a startup program or had a startup. I also wanted someone that came from a top school. Not even a top school, they were a top academic student in their school, and them doing something. I also have a theory. I love B students versus A students or C students.
Adam Robinson:	Why is that?
Rodney Williams:	I think B students are a unique characteristic. Because in most cases, a B student isn’t a student who’s studying every single day and is trying his hardest for a B. In most cases the B student has a social life, so they’re a people person. They’re charismatic. They’re the guys who went out, and they crammed it the night before, and they were able to wake up and go get a B. Those people tend to be also very, very dynamic. They tend to question why and kind of push some of the status quo, and I like that. When you think about an A student, an A student is really good at learning how to push a button the exact same way every single time, because that’s kind of how we teach in school. I think the B student is just a little bit more dynamic. Now, you can find A students like that, but the quickest way that I’ve found to kind of find that diverse group of skills was to look at the group that was a B student.
Rodney Williams:	That’s just my opinion, but it actually, it was a blog post by one of those top VCs, and they actually agree with my logic, so it was pretty awesome to see that as well.
Adam Robinson:	Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you formed that opinion. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never heard anyone describe it quite the way, from the founder’s seat, quite the way you have. But you know what? I see it. I see it, and as a B student myself, I’ve lived that. I’ve been that person. So I think you absolutely described my type and approach, and I would say organizations, pretty well known examples of companies that target the B student demographic and have made billion dollar businesses out of it, companies like Enterprise Holdings. I mean, they were targeting division two college athletes with 3.0 GPAs for that very reason. They’ve done quite well. They’re very cool. So was that a blog post that inspired you to think this way or was that thinking that was confirmed by someone you admired and respect from the investment community?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. It was more so the thinking that I had that was really just my gut in how I felt as I interviewed that first couple of hires. But then it was reconfirmed. It was confirmed via that VC, which was awesome.
Adam Robinson:	So tell me about your approach to the people side of your business. It sounds like you’ve just described the kind of personality type or life experience that you think predicts success for your organization or the way you’re running it. What informed that? Was that experience working with different kinds of people? Or was that just a philosophy you’ve developed on your own?
Rodney Williams:	I think it’s the philosophy that I’ve developed on our own. You gotta think about my background. I came from PNG. They’re legends in terms of hiring. Sometimes they say it’s seven times harder to get into PNG than it is to get into Harvard. Their logic is very similar if you think about their psychometric test that they ask every entering employee to take where you’re graded based on the top performers in the company. So there isn’t like a … So if the top performers in PNG would score an 80 on this test, then the closer you are to 80 is how you get hired, for example, versus … What that show you is it’s not about being always right, always wrong, it’s about a unique middle ground intention that I think people need to have to continue to drive. I think that’s part of why they’re described as type A personalities. However you want to describe it, but it’s a natural tension.
Adam Robinson:	How are you building your team at LISNR now that you’ve got the capital you need to accelerate growth? Talk about your approach to making sure you’ve got the right seats and right people in them.
Rodney Williams:	I’ve got a lot of philosophies. As we build and continue to build, and this is still present early on is that I think that being in a startup and growing this company at this stage is like a war. And what I mean by that is we’re in a war, and I want to build the best infantry and brigade or whatever you want to call it. I want really great sharpshooters. I want my artillery team. I need my medic. And what I mean by that is that’s the number one goal, right? We do not necessarily need to be best friends and we need to be connected in that, we need to be connected with a singular vision, and the best vision is a complete obsession with beating the opposition or driving innovation or going after a target or ultimately winning in our business. That is the common thread of everyone in the company, and it’s not about being friends or are we gonna work together.
	When you go to war, you don’t care if that sharp shooter has a issue. You want that sharp shooter to be the best in the world, because that’s my chance of survival, right? I just think that throughout our growth I tend to bring up a lot of these stories, and it’s really because I want people to rally behind a common vision, not a common style or workplace. I think it’s very, very important for us, especially at our stage, to rally behind that common vision and hire the best people no matter who they are, no matter what ethnic background they are, no matter etc, if they are the best at doing it or we feel that they could be the best.
Adam Robinson:	Tell me more about your thinking around a common vision versus a great workplace. What did you mean by that?
Rodney Williams:	Sometimes you get caught up into what makes you happy at a workplace. I have decided, and not just I, the company. We’ve gone through many different, what I would call, cultural evolutions of our workplace. There were two things that were really really important when we went through this exercise. It was really our employees needed a sense of purpose. We kind of gathered all of these unique personalities that wanted to go out and chase something ambitious, and they wanted to be purposely inspired. It wasn’t necessarily inspired by a paycheck. And so if you think about purpose, right, and that’s how we kind of crafted our vision, our mission, and that’s why we rally everyone on a single purpose and vision.
	I think the other part about that is that if that’s what’s most important, then we have to nail that. I think everything else is like sauce. It’s the other stuff, and it’s not necessarily gonna impact how you do business or how you … What we learned, which is that it was a smaller factor in our employee’s happiness. The biggest factor was purpose, purposely inspired work, going out and really kind of breaking that. And we rally everything behind that versus anything else.
Adam Robinson:	Is there a common set or stated core values of the business that drives that purpose?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah, there is. There is the obvious and there’s the undertone. The obvious is that we’ve created this really compelling technology that could be each and everywhere, and we tend to have a group of people that want to go out and change the world and think they can. I think the undertone of that is that because we are people … We’re very open to all different people, my company looks very different. And what I mean by that is, I have a large amount of women engineers and women in leadership. I have an extremely diverse leadership team. In Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s kind of compelling, and the style, the way they dress, the way we work together. It’s aggressive. It feels like New York. When you walk in our office it feels like you just landed in New York [inaudible 00:14:28], right?
	You have 23-year-olds with 50-year-olds. You have 50-year-olds. We have everyone. The reason, when you think about stop worrying about style and cultural fit and how do we work together, and then rally on a purpose, and then you figure out how to work with that person because you have to. That is the best person for your success and each one of our successes. Now, the undertone based on everything I just told you is that they feel real proud about what they’re building in Cincinnati. When they walk out the door they wear a badge of uniqueness and creativity for that community. One of the undertone purposes or underlying purposes that we also found is that they really wanted to be this different thing for Cincinnati, and they wanted to create something that Cincinnati could also be proud of. As a historically conservative city, you can see why that was important for them.
Adam Robinson:	You mention diversity on your leadership team. Talk about the people around the table when you’re running the business. How are you assembling … You say you assemble the best person for the job. How does that apply to the leadership structure?
Rodney Williams:	It was exactly that, right? I drove this company to a point of that up to my experience level, and I think it was really important for me to bring on someone that could just do [inaudible 00:16:06]. He’s seen the movie before, and it was something I usually say. In my example, I’ll give you an example. I was looking for my president. I was looking for my head of operations. I was looking for that guy who was a company who previously was a CEO, was a CTO, ran a big business and a small business, raised millions of dollars before, and I wanted him to be crazy about this vision. So I actually went to our competitors, and not necessarily competitors in the startup sense, but competitive type technology in a big sense.
	At the time he was running a $250 million business unit at a company that was owned by Sony, and he was a GM. But it was something I found out, right? He was acquired into the company. At that startup how to raise funding. He was a former VC, and they were selling audio technology. That is the best person that I could possibly find.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a pretty good fit.
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I went on LinkedIn and I stalked him, right? I asked him to get him coffee, and we did. And he eventually joined the team at first as a board of advisor. He came to Cincinnati one time and I convinced him to come over and be a president. So, again, I think it’s important to recruit people … Recruit skills that you have adages in and continue. That’s very, very important, and that [inaudible 00:17:32] the best to do the job. So when I look at that table of leadership that includes my president, our head of finance, our head of sales, our head of engineering, our head of product, they’re the best people that I could find for the job.
Adam Robinson:	So you went after this guy it sounds like. What was the total timeframe from the first LinkedIn message all the way through to signing to come on board full time to run the business?
Rodney Williams:	About three months.
Adam Robinson:	Three months?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah.
Adam Robinson:	Okay. You hear most venture-funded companies will go out and hire a search firm and spend a bucket of money, and sometimes find the right person. It sounds like you went at him like a missile. How did you know?
Rodney Williams:	I didn’t. I actually had a search firm. First of all, I just think that that most important person is really special, and you need to be highly involved in that process. I also learned that search firms, someone else can never sell your company or vision better than you. They can’t really inspire an interested party to leave their job. Only the founder can. That’s what makes founders founders and non-founders non-founders. So I started to see that with how the search firm at the time and the candidates they were bringing, right? The candidates were very opportunistic. They were great candidates, but they weren’t necessarily the perfect candidate. I also … Eric was not the first person or the last person that I reached out to.
	I reached out to about 30 people. I had 20 conversations. I learned so much in that process. Basically, I talked to almost every industry leader that was indirectly related to what I was doing, and I was able to not only learn from them, but also understand what I needed to make this company successful. I think that’s why it worked out.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you’re assembling a team with the philosophy that the best contributor, best player in the role, the best specialist on the team, that’s what you’re working for. Talk about your philosophy around providing feedback, performance coaching when things aren’t going well. How do you know when someone’s not working out, and what’s your approach to handling that?
Rodney Williams:	I think over time my approach is to let them go asap. I think I define that going well as one thing. It’s not driving business results. That’s it. Right? It’s falling short on commitments that you agreed to. It’s falling short on things you agreed to. I’m a person who gives a lot of autonomy, because I think I hire people who should be able to do this job. So if we align on expectations, and three months from now you don’t deliver on those expectations, then you’re at risk or we need to understand why. Maybe some could be business related or economic related or something can be other reasons, but we need to align on that, and then we need to try one more time. And then if that one more time comes and you’re still missing on these, then this is probably not gonna be best the situation for you.
	I am very factual and systematic, but I’ll give you an example. Even in the beginning, my president was the right guy. So you give autonomy, which is hard, and you’re waiting for him to do right or do wrong. But also what you have to learn is you have to learn how to communicate. I think that’s one of the things that I tend to invest in the organization. We have people that come and talk to us about how you communicate. Because obviously you can imagine [inaudible 00:21:37] my president and I, we’re culturally very different in terms of style, communication, and just everything. So we had to rally behind that common ground to figure out how to communicate if we were gonna be affected. And that’s a different problem or different thing.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. Well, five years in looking at what you’ve learned, would you say that you’ve got an overriding philosophy for managing the people side of the business? And if so how would you describe that to us?
Rodney Williams:	Yeah. I think hire and hire well and fire and fire well. And I read that. I actually read that. If you read The Everything Store and Jeff Bezos, he was ruthless at hiring and firing. You’re either the right person or you’re not, and you can feel it in your gut if you think they can bring your vision to life in their role, and you know it, and you know when it’s not working out like you want it. Sometimes people turn around. In most cases they don’t. I just think it’s very realistic of yourself. In the beginning days, I let way too many people stay on the ride versus becoming a leader in the organization and grow.
Adam Robinson:	What do you mean by that, “stay on the ride?”
Rodney Williams:	I like to say it, you have people that people work for and then you have people who work for people. That’s really simple. There’s really two types of people in this world. There’s nothing wrong with either one of them, but when you’re in the earlier stage of a startup, those first 30, you really need a group of people that people want to work for. Everybody is a leader. Everybody is driving something incredibly important. Everybody is the first or number two member of a team. You can imagine, right? And then everybody is doing it probably a little bit earlier than they would be doing it if they were at a bigger company. So you need those people that can either get into that. When you’re at a startup, this is not the place that you’re gonna have a learning module on a laptop where you can learn how to be a manager, or it’s not the place where you’re gonna get a significant amount of coaching.
	That’s just not realistic. You gotta learn from the experiences that you’re gonna be put in. You gotta learn from your resources around you. You have to learn from people inside your company that are more experienced than you, and you have to go. And that just takes a certain type of person.
Adam Robinson:	It sounds like you read a lot. What are you reading right now? What’s on the nightstand? And is that something you’d recommend to our audience of founders and entrepreneurs?
Rodney Williams:	I think I would definitely … But Jeff’s book is awesome. It’s The Everything Store. It’s a little bit ruthless, but it’s awesome. I’m not as aggressive as Jeff, but I think it’s a testament to his culture. He doesn’t get, I don’t think Amazon gets flying scores for his culture, because people now know it’s competitive. He has one goal. I think that’s really important when you talk about a successful company. Sometimes we get caught up in creating a socially impactful company or a company that … All those things matter, and when everything is going well, all those things do not matter when you can’t pay a paycheck. I don’t know. But great book. I highly recommend it. Right now’s not a heavy reading moment for me currently, but that book is something that I think any entrepreneur or anyone who thinks they should think about going is reading it. It’s a great story, and it’s a great look into a person’s passion and goals.
Adam Robinson:	With the final minute here we’ve got, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us whether or not you’ve successfully tackled the biggest thing on your plate that’s gonna lead to your success at LISNR over the next 12 months, what will you be telling us happened?
Rodney Williams:	I think that growth. I have successfully tackled growth. We’re at a unique stage where we have to grow substantially. The business has to grow. That means bookings, revenue, product innovation, and we have significant [inaudible 00:26:39]. I have to learn how to grow to the next level. I think every level we need to learn how to grow. Every level is harder and guess what? I’m not some super experienced CEO who’s done it 13 times already. This is my first time learning how to do it. I gotta figure out how to grow. This time next year we’re gonna double. We’re gonna try to do it out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re gonna-
Adam Robinson:	There you go.
Rodney Williams:	We’re gonna try-
Adam Robinson:	Midwest.
Rodney Williams:	Replicate the culture that we have at 40 with 80. These are things that, it’s gonna be really tough. People’s roles are gonna be more specific with higher expectations. I think I’m gonna have higher expectations for myself as well. That’s what will happen.
Adam Robinson:	That’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Rodney Williams, co-founder and CEO of LISNR. On that hyper growth path, Rodney, thank you so much for being with us on the program.
Rodney Williams:	Thank you. I appreciate it, and I had a good time.
Adam Robinson:	That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.