SaaStr 311: When To Hire Generalists vs Specialists, How To Retain Agility With Scale and Process and How To Always Keep Your Hiring Funnel Full with Karl Sun, Founder & CEO @ Lucidchart

The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Karl Sun is the Founder & CEO @ Lucidchart, a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation. To date, Karl has raised $114M with Lucidchart from some of the best in the business including K9 Ventures, Meritech, Iconiq, GV and Kickstart in Utah. As for Karl, prior to founding the company he spent 6 years at Google in some fascinating roles including Head of Patents, Head of Business Development in China and running Google’s energy investments. As a result of his success, Karl was recently announced as EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Karl made his way into the world of SaaS with the founding of Lucidchart having been Head of Business Development for Google in China and Head of Patents?
• How does one know when we need to hire generalists vs specialists? How does this requirement change as the company scales? How does Karl fundamentally think about finding great talent and keeping top of funnel full? How does Karl think about working with recruiters? What works? What does not work?
• Karl has been in every interview for every new hire for the first 6 years of the business, why? How does Karl think about doing this at scale? How does Karl structure the hiring process today? Why do they have a hiring committee? What does the process look like? How do they assess and test for culture?
• How does Karl think about retaining agility and flexibility with scale? How does Karl maintain employee empowerment with the implementation of process? How does Karl think about the balance between creating accountability without a fear of failure? What are the challenges of this?

Karl’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What is the hardest role to hire for today? Why?
2. Hardest element of karl’s role as CEO today? Why?
3. What does Karl know now that he wishes he had known at the founding of the company?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Karl Sun