EP22: Lessons from building world class teams at Carta and DoorDash, with Nolan Church, founder/CEO of Continuum, ex-Chief People Officer at Carta, ex-Head of Talent at DoorDash

Paradigm Shift

Nolan is one of the best HR leaders in the world for high growth startups. He’s currently the Founder/CEO at Continuum, which is a talent marketplace that helps startups hire the best people for key functional needs, and helps executives work with multiple companies at once.

Before that he was the Chief People Officer at Carta helping it grow to a $10b valuation, Head of Talent at DoorDash from early days of 50 employees to 800+ employees, and a recruiter at Google helping scale a new org from zero to 80 engineers.

Thanks to Ashley Davis and Jessica Stolbach for contributing some great questions.

In this episode we discuss:

1. Early career and landing at Google
   1. How did you go from being a collegiate baseball player to working at Google?
   2. What did you learn at Google based on how they approached recruiting?
   3. How did Google approach Hiring Committee and what did you learn from it?
   4. What did the recruiting funnel look like at Google vs startups later in your career?
   5. What did speed of hiring look like at Google vs Facebook, startups, etc?
2. Leading recruiting for DoorDash during hyper growth from 50 to 800+
   1. How did you end up at DoorDash and what was the scale like? h/t Kym Lee!
   2. You’ve said Tony is the best recruiter in the world. What makes him so great?
   3. What were you optimizing for when you moved to DoorDash and why did you pick them?
   4. What were the challenges recruiting and how did you approach it?
   5. How did you maintain and raise the hiring bar while scaling quickly?
   6. How did you get hiring managers to own sourcing and recruiting outcomes?
   7. What KPIs and funnel metrics were you focused on each month/quarter?
   8. How did you hire people better than you? How did you help people grow?
3. Leading the HR function at Carta as CPO
   1. What led you to Carta? What was the state of the company when you got there?
   2. What was the nature of the network effect at Carta that fueled the business?
   3. What are your observations on some of the problems with equity today?
   4. What are some trends you’ve seen in the talent and equity market?
4. Founding story and vision for Continuum
   1. What is Continuum and what problems are you solving?
   2. What are you hearing from companies and execs on fractional opportunities?
   3. What is your vision for Continuum?
   4. What has been the most humbling part of being a first-time founder?
5. Recruiting and HR at startups
   1. What is your HR advice for early-stage founders?
   2. How should founders think about HR strategically?
   3. When should a startup hire their first recruiter?
   4. What do you look for when hiring recruiters?
   5. How do you think about the value of an advisor?
   6. What makes someone a great recruiter?
6. Closeout questions
   1. What is the most difficult feedback you’ve received?
   2. What are you optimizing for at this point in your career and how has that evolved?
   3. What are some of your superpowers that you find yourself leaning on often?

Links

• Follow Nolan on Twitter
• Read Nolan’s thread on he helped DoorDash grow from 50 to 800+ employees
• Check out Continuum— to hire an exec or join as an exec

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