Evan Reiser, CEO and co-founder of Abnormal Security, walks students through the methodologies needed to lead a company from day one, from picking a co-founder to building the initial sales team. Prior to Abnormal Security, Evan recently led product and machine learning teams at Twitter after co-founding successful companies including Bloomspot, acquired by JPMorgan Chase, and AdStack, acquired by TellApart.
Yeah. so I think in those kinds of one-on-one conversations, that's the first, that's the first way to get feedback, Is directly with the, your kind of executives near your peers. and just saying, Hey,what do you need from me to be successful? And that can be very open-ended right.
Evan: And different people want different things. I think that's one way about how you can better, better coach people, kind of one. and ultimately got to help them be successful. I think that there's a second thing, which I do not that I'm,certainly not a role model CEO, but I'll just share what's worked for me.
the second thing is really using, using your kind of staff and using your staff needs in particular as a forum for kind of [00:31:00] getting feedback. So I like to ask, in some sort of regular cadence, maybe it's twice a year, Maybe it's, I do it probably twice a year.
but asking the team, these two, two questions, one is, what are some ways in which, my leadership is really enabling and supporting the team. And in some ways that's a more elegant way of asking like, Hey, what should I keep doing? Right?
Evan: Or what, what are some things that I'm doing that are helpful right there? Do you want to ask the kind of more critical version of that? what are some of the, what are some of the ways in which I'm working that is, creating more obstacles or getting in the way of us really having a fully optimized team.
And I think that, getting feedback from the staff. about, missing, what do you want to, what should you be doubling down on? What are things you should be? what are these you should keep doing? What are things that, you should stop or start doing? I think that's really good feedback.
I also think that,I think most people would try to get that feedback in a one-on-one setting. I think it's really important, especially as a CEO to get that feedback in a team setting, because it's an opportunity to really train the executive staff to give that type of [00:32:00] feedback right.
In a less kind of formal and high stakes way. And I think it's an opportunity for see us build a culture of, Hey, like we're a high performance organization we're going to share we're going to share critical feedback. Like all the time. It's not like a, it's not like a emotional thing.
We're just trying to all help each other up their game so that the CEO can be a role model there. I think that the final way in which I try to get feedback is through the board. So I think on a similar cadence, Maybe, twice a year, spending an hour in the board meeting and asking the board member of the same things.
what are similar. what are some of the things that, you know, or, what are some of the ways you would evaluate the CEO's performance, right at this company this time? Where are some of the ways in which Evan's leadership is, being effective for kind of driving company results?
where are some of the, what are some of the things you'd like to see Evan do differently? where's the things we need to be evolving over time. And where it's really helped guests the next level. So I think, similar to driving that feedback culture reperformance who that culture in the staff meeting, because it was a good thing to do at the board level.
As a sea of very selfish, like I want to know, right? all the board member expectations, I want to know, where I'm [00:33:00] doing well, what they want to see more of, Where some of the gaps are. Not that I'm going to blindly follow all the feedback. But I want at least hear the inputs.
So I know what their mental model is. And I can reconcile that with. My internal opinion, but what high performance looks like for the role? So I think in all those conversations, right? I think all of these kind of come down to partnership where, if you're really committed to partnership with your individual executives, your staff, your board, and you have a good foundation of trust that opens up the opportunity for you to have, these more kind of direct conversations about, what, how that partnership needs to evolve and how your performance as CEO needs to evolve in order for you to ultimately be successful.
