Rand Fishkin
Moz
Rand Fishkin has built three companies without venture capital, and he’s learned something the entire startup world gets wrong: hiring for likability beats hiring for credentials every time. As co-founder of Spark Toro, Alert Mouse, and Snack Bar Studio, Rand has structured his companies to prioritize psychological safety, remote work, and small teams over growth-at-all-costs. His newest venture is a video game launching on Steam and Switch, and along the way, he discovered that AI labels are toxic to game sales.
When Rand started hiring at Moz 25 years ago, he had no management experience. He did what felt right: he hired people he personally liked, then built relationships with them. That instinct has only strengthened across three companies.
At Spark Toro, everyone on the team was a close friend before they became employees. Casey was already a friend. Christy applied for a role, but Rand hesitated because she had a full-time job. She pitched him anyway: “I always have a side hustle going. My employer’s cool with it. Plus, I really want to work with you.” Amanda was doing contract work when she literally pitched herself as the first employee at a lunch in California.
The conventional wisdom from Silicon Valley is that you optimize for smart, driven, experienced people. Rand says that’s backwards. Working with people you actually enjoy spending time with produces better outcomes, especially in remote environments where you’ll never see them in person but still need trust.
Working with really smart, driven, experienced people is not nearly as fun, not nearly as wonderful in life as working with people who you enjoy spending time with and who you click with professionally.
Rand Fishkin, Spark Toro
Rand raised $1.3 million for Spark Toro and $2.1 million for Snack Bar Studio without touching venture capital. Instead, he used a revenue-sharing model where investors get their principal back, then receive dividend payments based on cash flow. If the company ever sells, they get their ownership stake multiplied.
The structure is radically different from VC. He doesn’t promise 10x or 100x returns. He promises a high probability of returning your capital, then steady dividend payments. That removes the pressure to chase hypergrowth or sell the company. When acquisition offers come in, Rand doesn’t feel obligated to say yes. The dividend stream in a few years will exceed what most acquirers are offering anyway.
Rand open-sourced his funding documents on Spark Toro’s website so other founders don’t have to pay lawyers to build the same structure. The docs include everything you need: the LLC setup for Spark Toro, the C-Corp structure for Snack Bar Studio, and the reasoning behind each choice.
VC makes sense for pharmaceuticals, clean energy, and companies with massive upfront capital needs. For most software and game studios, it’s a trap. You raise money because other founders are raising it, not because you need it.
I didn’t raise institutional capital. You don’t owe anybody anything except their money back and dividend returns on their investment.
Rand Fishkin, Spark Toro
Rand co-founded Snack Bar Studio to build a video game launching on Steam, Switch, and Xbox. The game is called “The Snack Bar at the End of the World,” set in a 1960s Italian hilltop town where you forage for ingredients, fight magically enhanced chickens and pigs, and cook traditional Italian recipes. His wife, Geraldine Deer, is a James Beard award-winning food writer and lead writer on the game.
AI has been almost completely useless for the game. The games industry is deeply anti-AI, and game consumers hate it too. If you use AI to generate art for a chicken, a boar, or an exploding tomato, you have to label it on Steam and Switch. Games with AI labels see sales drop precipitously. It’s considered a death knell for an indie studio right now.
Rand hasn’t used AI for art, music, writing, or narrative. The only use case he’s found is asking ChatGPT for lists of traditional Italian recipes and citations to the original sources, the way he’d use a search engine.
Game sales with the AI label drop precipitously. It’s almost considered a death knell to your studio to launch a game with AI right now.
Rand Fishkin, Snack Bar Studio
Nicholas Krajewski, the lead game designer for Assassin’s Creed, is now the co-founder and game designer at Snack Bar Studio. Rand found him by following his work on Reddit and in his game design community for four years. He hired him as a consultant first, then invited him to Italy to hang out in person with Rand and Geraldine.
That trip was the pitch. Rand covered a hotel room and let Nico bring his girlfriend (now wife). They spent time together, built trust, and eventually Rand asked him to leave his big studio job and start the game studio with them. The recruitment wasn’t about competing for talent on credentials. It was about finding someone Rand trusted, liking them, and creating an environment where they’d want to work together.
Snack Bar has nine people total. It’s the largest of his three companies. Rand runs it more structured than Spark Toro or Alert Mouse because that’s what works for a video game launch and what fits his lead engineer and co-founder Geraldine, who thrives with process and structure. He architected the company to match the people, not the other way around.
Google’s Project Aristotle research found that the number one predictor of team performance was not intelligence, code quality, or test scores. It was psychological safety: do people feel comfortable sharing personal things and being emotionally vulnerable with their colleagues?
Rand’s approach to building that safety is direct. His job is to show people he cares deeply about them. When conflict happens between team members, he resolves it with empathy and reminds them they like and trust each other. He models that behavior across the company so everyone else does the same.
He’s learned to let go of his old instinct to keep people at all costs. Early at Moz, he’d see an underperformer and hesitate to let them go. Then they’d move to another company and excel. It wasn’t that they were bad. It was fit. Some people thrive in structured environments. Others flourish in processless ones. Rand doesn’t use performance reviews or formal structures at Spark Toro and Alert Mouse. He finds people who work well in that kind of environment, and for those who don’t, he helps them find a better fit elsewhere.
Nobody’s bad or good. There’s no A players and B players. There’s just A fit, B fit, C fit.
Rand Fishkin, Spark Toro
Rand’s advice to first-time founders is simple: go to therapy first. Not a business coach. A therapist. If you understand your personality, your biases, where they come from, and which ones you need to change, nothing else will have a bigger impact on company culture.
You’ll get better at hiring, at letting people go when it’s not a fit, at building process, at forgiving yourself when things go wrong, and at communicating clearly. The second thing is to architect your company upfront. With Casey, Rand asked all the hard questions before they started: What happens if someone wants to buy us? What happens if one of us can’t work anymore? What happens if there’s a divorce? What happens if Rand gets hit by a bus?
Those conversations created infrastructure that lets you make tough decisions without them becoming contentious. It’s the same architecture approach he uses across hiring, funding, management structure, and incentives. Everything should fit together so the company works the way you actually want it to work, not the way someone else says you should run it.
Snack Bar Studio is launching in mid-2025 on Steam, Switch, and Xbox. You can sign up for updates at snackbarstudio.com. In the meantime, set up alerts at Alert Mouse for your name and company, and check out Spark Toro for audience research. Rand has also published his funding documents and company architecture notes publicly on the Spark Toro website for founders who want to follow the same non-VC path.
Have you been able to replace people with AI?
In the game space, AI is very unhelpful with the exception of like maybe debugging some code. The games industry is extremely anti-AII and games consumers are super anti-AII. If we were to use AI to make the art for our boar or our chicken or our tomatoes that explode, you have to label that in Steam. You have to label it in Switch. and game sales with the AI label drop precipitously. It's almost considered anma like a deathnell to your studio to launch a game with AI. Right now, the only thing I've really used AI for is, hey, help me get a list of traditional Italian recipes and the citation to the link, you know, sort of like I'd use a search engine. The AI revolution, I'm a little skeptical of the software and tech revolution. I'm all in. I'm Louise Scent and this is who we hire. Today we have the pleasure of being joined by Rand Fishkin. Rand is a co-founder of Spark Toro, Alert Mouse and Snack Bar Studio. He authored Lost and Founder and previously Rand was the founder of Moz and Inbound.org where I spent a good portion of my life learning SEO and marketing. Rand, thanks so much for being here. Really excited to have you on to talk about hiring and growing and building companies.
Yeah, my pleasure, Luis. Thank you for having me.
So, going back in time, Rand, you know, you from your book, I gathered you loved SEO, but being a CEO was a something that had to be learned. And you know when you were hiring the first folks u back then how you know what did you think about hiring 20 years ago when you were building companies and how has that changed through the last three companies that you've built now? Um you know I I we can get into size or you know thoughts behind it. Uh so I'm really excited just to to learn how uh that's transpired over over the years. So, you know, 20 25 years ago when I was first hiring folks at Moz, I was a kid, man. You know, like I I had never really worked anywhere else. Um, I had worked in a, you know, couple of retail shops in college, like to make enough to pay my tuition, but, you know, no hiring knowledge whatsoever, no management experience. So ev everything I did was unintentionally sometimes correct and very often just just totally wrong. I think the one thing the one thing I did early on that I might actually recommend to folks and that I do again is hire people that I personally like I and and over skills and experience and intelligence and knowledge and all that kind of stuff. You know what I'm going to say? That's totally contrary to what every Silicon Valley investor and, you know, tech bro type would tell you is that working with really smart, driven, you know, experienced people is not nearly as fun, not nearly as wonderful in life as working with people who you enjoy spending time with and who you click with professionally.
I love that. Even even remotely, even if you're not seeing them in a Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, everyone every single person that I work with that I've hired today, um maybe with the exception of a couple snack bar contractors who I don't don't know very well because we we don't spend very much time together. I know and like personally, even though we're remote, we we get together, right? So the snack bar team is the largest of the companies that I run now. We're nine people. Um wow. And every
the newest and largest.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Ex. Uh well, Alert Mouse is the newest. Um Yeah. But but Snackbar um is the largest. And I love small companies. I love small teams of people who care deeply about each other and who are willing to sacrifice um revenue growth uh sort of professional success to maintain high quality relationships and a better quality of life. I think I think the American way of maximizing revenue over all those other things
is a fundamental error in human thinking. And I and I suspect that I hope in decades and centuries to come that it will be viewed with like a oh man yeah they look at them they made the same mistakes that you know whatever the Roman Empire or the Visigoths or you know until made and and people will sort of say you know what the right way to be is let's be balanced in our lives. Let's look at professional success as one kind of success but not the only kind of success.
I love it. I was reading the five dysfunctions of Fatim. I rereading it last week and it talked a lot about this, right? Like what what is politics when you're watching what you say because you know you want to change behavior rather than saying what you mean and it it is so much more fun to work with a team you enjoy and like and can grow it. Um how do you go find those people?
Two ways. One is through personal and professional networks. So, everyone I work with at Spark Toro is a personal close friend.
Casey, are you in the Seattle community?
No, not uh not entirely. Um well, Casey and Christy live respectively half an hour and an hour outside the city. Amanda is in California, um Southern California, but you know, we sort of we all were friends before we started working together. Christy, you know, applied for uh the chief of staff job last year. She'd been a longtime friend and I kind of had this like Christristie, don't you have this full-time job and how are you going to do this? She's like, "Don't worry, I always have a side hustle going. My employer's cool with it. Plus, I really want to work with you. I think we'd have a lot of fun." And and it's so great. Same with Amanda, right? Like Amanda was um doing some contract stuff, doing some consulting, and then she she basically pitched Geraldine and I at at a lunch that we had in California. She was like, "Yeah, yeah, this has been great. I really like you. Here's why I should be uh Spartro's first employee.
Wow. I love that.
Made a great made a great case for it, you know. Um
and and the creator of the job.
Yeah. I think what's I think what's been wonderful about that is that the degree to which it has brought the things in life that really matter to all of us is far greater than let's imagine. Let's imagine there's some other Amanda out there right who I don't know is somehow 20% more whatever, you know, hardworking or or productive or or like needle move, you know, needle moving, right, to use the all the VC speak. Um, but Casey and I don't enjoy spending time with that person.
Why why would we hire, you know, him or her instead of Amanda? What? to maximize revenue growth. I you know like what the whole point of a the whole point of a company especially a company that's not a whatever public company IPO style company
is to provide a life you know an an economic life that serves your personal life. And it's really super weird that people don't understand that serving your life is the goal of a company like what?
Yeah. And are are you able to do that if you know you've been on the other side of the spectrum where you have raised eight millions of dollars, right? Are you able to do that if
No.
Okay.
Yeah. So, so this is right. So, fundamentally when people are like how can you get away with this and the answer is I didn't raise institutional capital. You don't you don't owe anybody anything.
Yeah, I owe Spark Turo's investors and Snack Bars investors their money back and dividend returns on their investment. But I I have not made a commitment to them that I will try and make 10 to 100 times their money back or completely crater and make zero dollars back. That is not the the bet and the agreement that we've made. The agreement that I made is I am going to run a company that has a very very high chance of getting you your money back and then making you a little bit of money every year after that.
That's phenomenal. And
high high chance of lower return, not incredibly tiny chance of, you know, moonshot.
Yeah. So that's, you know, the VC model doesn't work there, right? They they need that moonshot.
I you know what I think, Louise? I don't think they do. I think they're just culturally biased by history and are fooling themselves into thinking there's no way to make money on small return companies. And as proof of this, take a look at Tiny Seed. Tiny Seed Investment just paid us back another check from one of their companies that did well. Uh Tiny Seed uses Spark Toro's model as their investment philosophy and their and in their underlying docs. Uh this is Rob Walling's investment fund which which Geraldine and I put money into a few years ago and we have now made like 130% return on the on the first fund. It's only been 5 years.
That's phenomenal.
It's a better It's such a better return than the average VC. I I don't know like whatever it VCs are just that whole model is broken. I don't know
what's your next book. think I I think a lot of people are going to write books, you know, given given how much of the venture world is in the Epstein files. I think that there's going to be a lot of a lot more skepticism applied to that universe. You know, you look at whatever somebody like Andre Horowitz and you're like, wait a minute, you have you have partners who made dozens of visits to the island. Like that is so sketchy. It is just
Oh, I didn't go deep in there. So, and it's I mean the I think the information published an article a few days ago that was like hey here's all the venture capitalists who appear in the Epstein files and like all this crazy shady stuff and how they're all connected and stuff and you yeah you're just like man I
I don't know you know who no one no one knows for certain like whether those people also committed heinous crimes during this or whether it's just they're all sort of connected in this gross ecosystem of not caring about who they work with.
Yeah. I mean, even being there, it it, you know, it's a huge red flag. So, um, for the, you know, going back, like when does the VC model make sense? Like, when does it make sense to go and hire, you know, 100 people? Uh,
yeah.
Yeah. When when does that make sense? Like when
this is a completely fair question, Luis, like I don't when people are like, gosh, Rand is so antiVC. I am for like 99% of companies, but look, if you're building a pharmaceutical company and you need to do drug testing, research, you got to raise a ton of money and the risk model, you know, is super high. So, venture makes a lot of sense for that. Um, if you're doing clean tech, clean energy, yeah, if you're doing um, you know, a lot of like uh there's a lot of like weather hacking stuff that's coming out, I get it. If you're doing AI kinds of things, maybe if you're one of the companies building the fundamental models, you need a ton of money to do that. But I think a lot of AI software companies don't don't actually need to raise very much. They're just raising a ton of money because venture is throwing so much money at that field. Um, which is a little similar to Moz, right? Like Moz was in SAS and in market, you know, digital marketing software, which at the time was nowhere near as hot as AI software is right now. But it was definitely like a I don't know exactly how to describe it. Running that company or any company in that space, you felt left out. I felt left out if I wasn't raising and trying to build something. And to be honest, I was not mature enough. I was not mature enough to know what I was getting myself into. Um and I I think you know I think the industry pres on that inexperience and immaturity a little bit.
Yeah. And I you know even if you have been I think you need to go through it to experience it and now you know be on the opposite end of the spectrum where you know I I I listened to your your last podcast on AI and the hype where you talked about you know hiring consultants and agencies where you can read the capital really fast. Uh and so that that's the new way, right? I mean, there's companies that are being built that are turning into billion-dollar companies with record low number of actual employees there with AI and you know, so um have you been able to replace people with AI and in any component where you would have roles before?
No. No slash. Um I ask everybody this question and then nobody has been able to do it but they're like we're close
well and if you look at you know if you look sort of at global employment or even US employment you see I think the same thing that we're experiencing which which is essentially we do more with contractors agencies and and the help of I would say software not just AI like there's there's lots of software products and cloud cloud comput products and just things people have built that have that are really helpful. There's there's APIs for everything and services for everything and data for everything and we can just connect a lot of that stuff to what we do. So rather than as an example like rather than having to figure out ah how the heck do we sort of crawl and index LinkedIn profiles blah blah blah we're like oh leadfuse does that great we'll buy the API data from them like how do we build a clickstream panel of our own oh no wait we can just buy that from datos neither of them are like AI companies but both of them have absolutely saved us from having to I don't know build out a big engineering team to go do those things just like AWS you know cloud hosting has saved us from a huge infrastructure team. So, a the AI revolution, I'm a little skeptical of the software and tech revolution. I'm all in. Like, I get it. It is it is built something out. But those people those people aren't unemployed. They're just specialized employed at a leadfuse, at a datos, at an Amazon Web Services, right? At a at a chat GPT, at or open AAI, at Claude, like they're employed, they're they're working. And that's why you see unemployment rates at like historical lows continuing, you know, continuing that pace.
You said the the newest one you you have a co-founder,
Snack Bar Studios. Yeah.
Snackar Studio.
Nine people making our first video game um which will be out for for Steam and Switch and Xbox uh hopefully next year, middle of next year.
Video game. How did how did you get into video games? This is amazing.
Well, so I've always been a software entrepreneur, right? But I've never done consumer software. Video games were were sort of an a semi-obvious pivot for that. I I I have lots of passion and interest there. Um and when I looked at the indie games market, I really liked everything I saw about it. Like there's just an extremely high correlation between quality of game, you know, how fun and enjoyable a game is and how well it performs. And that is true in vanishingly few numbers of sectors of the economy like it you know the the best I I'll give you right like Louise I'm sure you can imagine whatever in the world of music or television shows or um movies or plays and musicals or I don't know um paintings you know whatever like the best thing the best one of those in those categories probably no No one's heard of it and it it never even got funded, you know, it never got made, right? But video games, weirdly, when you do like the regression analysis, you kind of go, "Huh, the better a game is, the better it sells." Mo for the most part, and especially in the indie market, right? If you exclude kind of the big publishers who throw bajillions of dollars at marketing.
Yeah. Yeah. It was it was just a very appealing field. We raised $2.1 million uh the same way actually that we raised money for Spark Toro
which is like can you can you share you know for somebody wanting to not do the VC route
uh like how do they do this?
Yeah. So um two things I'll say here. One I'm happy to describe it but two if you go to Spark Toro's website we open sourced our funding docs for both the LLC of Spark Toro itself. So you can if you Google Spark Toro funding, we like paid our lawyers extra to be able to open source it so you can download the docs from a Google Drive and fill in the blanks and like not have to pay a ton of money to to do this yourself.
Amazing.
Yeah. Yeah. Please, by all means, you can also read about the structure. And we did the same thing for Snackbar, which is a CC Corp, uh not an LLC
and and for a variety of reasons, which I describe in the posts themselves why we did those two differently. Um but both both essentially raise money with the same promise to investors which is you know let's imagine uh that Louise you put in $100,000 to Spark Toro uh 5 years ago 6 years ago and uh in 20 2024 I think we basically paid you back your $100,000 because we we used that revenue to sort of build the company and then grow and launch and um and then we repaid our investors their their one point I think we raised 1.3 for Spark Toro. So that money went back to their to investors and now we're basically like, you know, building up cash flow again to make dividend payments hopefully every few years or year depending on it. And um everybody sort of benefits to their ownership prata. If the company should ever sell, you also get that money, right? Like so, you know, if you own whatever 2% of Spark Toro for, you know, $100,000 or something and it sells for $20 million someday, you will get your, you know, $400,000 or whatever it is. So great, you know, like that's our that's our goal. Um, but we don't have to sell. Like we have no pressure to when people have reached out and said, "Hey, would you sell the company?" We're like, "Well, how much would you give us for it for it?" And then they're like, "Well, you know, maybe this many millions of dollars." and we go, "Well, the dividend payments in a few years are going to be there. So, explain to me why we would accept that." You know,
yeah, you you've optimized for cash flow. Uh you've paid your investors back. There's no pressure.
You're working with people you love and creating great stuff. Why?
Oh, yeah. Why would we do that when we could, you know, raise VC and fail 99 times out of 100 and then the one time turn into, I don't know, some some sketchy dudes, you know? That's a a great way to look at it. So, for your first video game, like what what does it take to, you know, like you you have nine people. Is that enough to go build a video game? Has AI helped in that component for for designing and and building as well? um almost not at all. Uh weirdly enough, AI AI
Interesting in the game space, AI is very unhelpful with the exception of like,
you know, uh maybe debugging some code or something like that. But but for example, you know, we're building the game in Unity, which is a um sort of one of the two primary commercial engines for building games, Unreal being the other one.
And Unity is not open source. So, it's not, you know, you can't go to Copilot or Claude and be like, "Hey, write me this in Unity. It just it just doesn't work. There there's some underlying code that you can still um get, but also the games industry is extremely anti-AII. Um, and games consumers are super a anti-AI. So, if you for example, let's say you
make one of your monsters, right? like we we decide to make a boar or a chicken. So, in in our video game, you you forage for ingredients. Um and so you have to fight these sort of magically enhanced chickens and and pigs and everything.
I love it. I I played Runescape back in the day, so it's triggering some some memories there.
Yeah. Yeah. Fun. Great. And and so if we were to use AI to make the art for our boar or our chicken or our tomatoes that explode or whatever, you have to label that in Steam. You have to label it in Switch and
you should. Yeah.
And game sales with the AI label drop precipitously.
Wow.
Like it does it. It's almost considered anthma like a deathnell to your studio to launch a game with AI right now. There's a few people who are trying it. I don't doubt that in 1015 years it'll be more common, but we're not using it for art. We don't use it for music. We don't use it for writing or narrative or story. The only thing I've really used AI for is, "Hey, help me get a list of traditional Italian recipes." And the citation to the link, you know, sort of like I'd use a search engine.
What are you What are you baking? What are you cooking?
Yeah. Yeah. So you you run a restaurant in the um in the video game, right? In snack bars. You run this
run a snack bar in a 1960s Italian hilltop town and then you you forge for your ingredients and you bring back your whatever petta, your guanchal, your pecarino romano and then you have to make these dishes, right? And so getting the lists of ingredients from the right websites, which which I you have to be really careful like I've had to look up the original Italian websites cuz Italians extremely picky about recipe construction and like you know is this cheese you can't if you put parigana right parmesan in in uh uh whatchamacall pepe or in spaghetti al carbonara you will get thrown right out of Italy like I think I my visa revoked Um,
I definitely always put Parmesan on my carbonar. So, don't tell them. Don't tell them.
Yeah. Yeah. If you go on Instagram, there's lots of chefs who are very, very against that. Um, but so AI been very unhelpful, but AI has been huge for Alert Mouse and actually really big for Spark Toro, too. Like, help us a ton. It just makes us way more it makes Casey more productive um in terms of pumping out features and sort of you know writing code e even some product design things uh and for alert mouse it's been very helpful too I think it will be even more helpful as we start to do more filtering of the alerts is that's been a that's been a big challenge.
It's really exciting to to to see that. Um so who was your first hire to build a video game? like how did that come you know are are these also people you know or do you you know go and say hey can you share with me the best video game uh you know designer programmer yeah I so I would we would not have started the studio if we had not been able to work with um this guy who's a you know a good friend and um an incredible game designer so so Nicholas Kraj uh basically was helping helping aspiring game designers and game creators. I saw him post a few times on Reddit. I went to his community um and just sort of was like, "This guy, this this guy is really amazing. He knows his stuff." He was the uh lead game designer for Assassin's Creed.
You recruited him through through a series of like four years of following and engaging. You recruited
That's that's exactly right. We we we had a couple of phone calls at first. I hired him as a consultant to like, you know, help out with some structural stuff. Then I was like, "Hey, Nick, Nico, like, how about how about you fly to Italy and meet us there one time and hang out with Geraldine and I?" And so we, you know, I think I I was like, "You take care of your flights. I'll I'll grab you an extra hotel room." And we stayed together in this amazing hotel in uh Aisi. Had an incredible time with him and his now now wife actually. Uh they were uh it was his girlfriend at the time but Yeah. And you know, basically winded and ded him until I was like, you should leave your, you know, your big studio um and come, you know, start this game studio with us.
That's phenomenal. So, is that you think that's a superpower of yours is like finding talented people? Uh, you're laughing. So, yes. I I don't know. Well, look, all all the people I work with are are definitely talented. I think the world of them. But like we talked about earlier, that's not what I optimize for, right? I'm not I'm not out there looking for like who's the smartest, fastest, you know, absolute top of their field, whatever. I I don't I don't recruit A players. I I don't even believe in A players. I I believe in sort of people have people will upgrade or downgrade their level of contribution and talent to a company based on their happiness there and their commitment and their psychological safety and the types of work that they're doing and the fit. And so what I want to say I'm really good at is meeting people, finding people that I care about and like and trust, building trust with them, and then working together to make companies where they fit really well and where the company fits them really well.
I love that. I Yeah, I you know, from all my conversations with founders, that's really a unique take. And I, you know, it's easy even for me to really just get in this productive mentality, right? Look at that scorecard. look at the the metrics at the end of the day and we don't remember people are people and that you know then they leave and you wonder why. So it Thank you. Thank you for for that conscious reminder that you know we need to do that.
Yeah. Do do you remember Louise? I um I don't know if this came across your like radar years ago, but Google back in the day uh maybe maybe 2015 16 they did this thing called Project Aristotle.
No. And it it stuck in my mind so much because the the research that came out of it was just absolutely fascinating. Essentially what project Aristotle was was Google trying to find what correlates with the most productive best sort of teams inside Google like how do we how do we find those people and what are they doing differently from the teams that are you know poor performers or mid-tier performers. And you know what they found?
Is this the making work play? Is this the where where you can make work play?
I think I think partially partially but like the number one factor was not intelligence. It wasn't how they had performed on any you know sort of test or um um recruiting process that Google had given them. It was not how much code they write or how fast they write it. It wasn't the quality or what um you know outsiders would say about the quality of the things that they had built. No, no, no, no, no. None of this. The number one predictor of team performance was psychological safety. Basically, do people on the team feel comfort comfortable sharing personal things um and being emotionally vulnerable with the people that they work with. That was the biggest predictor and one of the only predictors of
wow
like a success on a team. So how do you create that especially in a remote environment where you're not in an office with with everybody every day,
right? Yeah. So I think like for for me I feel like my job is you know especially with snack bar but but Spark Toro and Alert Mouse too like we get on calls and I am there to care deeply about people and to show them that I care deeply and to make sure that um in rare instances this does happen, right? like whenever there is conflict or tension between team members to resolve that in a way that is incredibly empathetic and kind to both people and and then make sure that everyone everyone throughout the company mimics that behavior, right? So like, hey, you know, whatever game designer and lead engineer are having conflict, h how do we resolve this and and bring them back to a place of remembering that they like each other and trust each other and everything else is going to be okay. If something takes longer, if something can't be done and we have to work around it, great. in the future. How do we communicate in a way that is really clear that this is this is not about you. I'm not upset with you. I am worried about hitting this deadline with this project. You know, it's all that kind of stuff. And that um that's something else. I I wish I had the emotional maturity back when I was at Moz and running that company. I think I Oh, I would have done such a better job there.
Yeah. I I mean if we take everything we know now right and go back it's uh but but these are the glory days we are we are living them right now there's there's so you know so so much to be excited for I think the what I want to go back to there is like
you know you gave the example you know probably hypothetical but in us we had this this issue right our you know marketer and developer not getting along um
and it you know I I can step in and be be in between and say, "Hey, let's get along." Right? But what what if you don't resolve that? Like what what is an there? What what do you you know, what do you do in that situation?
I mean, this is another one where my my immaturity at MA really shines through. You know, if you look at past examples, which was I was I was so worried about retaining people and making things work between people and I was so scared to let people go.
Yeah. It's uh I think in the book you you say don't ever leave is is a weird thing to say to employee you know and you you bought back your your CTO and some tech when when he had left.
Yeah. And like I look I I think um I have empathy for my former self right for for like this immature kid who started
Yeah. started a company. Um but man I you know I wish I could give this advice which is it is completely okay for people to say hey it's not you it's not me it's not us it's just not a fit that's that's okay go find a company where you are a great fit one of the things I learned at Moz you know we had we'd have all these performance reviews whatever blah blah blah the exact team would get together they'd be like okay this person's been underperforming for this many quarters whatever we're going to have to let them go and I'd be like, "Well, yeah, that that person's really an underperformer." No. Uh-uh. They'd go off to some other company rockstar. They'd do great,
right? And I'd be like, "Gosh, what what what how did that make sense? Why didn't they work out here?" And it's just fit. Nobody's bad or good. There's no A players and B players and C players. There's just A fit, B fit, C fit. you can't you can't generalize your experience at at one company and in one role to how you're going to do in other environments. And so I think the thing is you know when you're as you mentioned like your marketer and your engineer aren't getting along developer maybe it's a fit one of them might not be a fit for the environment and either you change the fit which is like the culture of the company or how communication or how processes work or you change the people and changing the people is just fine too. It is okay. Like this whole idea that you are supposed to be at a company for decades like you could go do other things. It's great.
I I love that take. So it you know it sounds like a lot of like EOS, right? So like the right person in the right seat. Is that you know do do you use a framework or a model to to build your new companies and are you using any of the you know processes that you had from from VC uh land into into your new companies now?
Very few. I mean like quarterly one-on- ons you know um
like performance reviews or like what?
No no performance reviews um and no not a lot of structure. This is one of the beauty beautiful things about being small. You don't need structure and you don't need a lot of process. Um and to be honest, I don't want those things. And so I want to find this is this is critically important. We have to find people who work really well in processless environments.
That is
wow.
Yeah.
That is very different from people who work really well in hyperstructured environments. Um I'll give you an example. So, one of one of my co-founders of Snack Bar Studio is is Geraldine, right? Geraldine Deer, who's who's my wife and also our lead uh writer. And of course, like the game wouldn't really work without her. She's a James Beard award-winning food writer. She's extremely well followed on social media. Like, her her presence and her writing is going to, you know, sort of make the game, right? And and um it's why the game is set in Italy because she's Italian and she speaks Italian and, you know, like all this kind of stuff. She is a process person. She is someone who thrives in an environment where she's like got structured things and knows how to do them. And so we've we've sort of architected Snackbar to be I would say far more process um and structured than Snack than Spark Toro or Alert Mouse. Like those two companies are you're like how do they do anything? And it's like well we email each other and we're like hey let's build this feature and then they do it. you know, like that's um which is really different from a snack bar where it's like, you know, weekly calls, uh assignments, structured documents. Um you know, our lead engineer is very process driven and she's helped to build that out. We're less formal around, I would say, performance reviews and communication structure, but pretty pretty process driven, and you need that for a video game launch, right? So, I think it it's that architecture of the company. Like everything we've been talking about on this conversation, Louise, is about architecting the company. From the funding structure to the incentives for how you make revenue to the management structure to the review process to the hiring process. It's all about making that fit the same way we talked about a human being fitting with a company culture.
I love that. I love that. Yeah, it's you you want to make it a fit. you you and it's really easy to go and see like one you know like ideally an interview process right before um and if you can just hire them as a consultant in the beginning and and see if there's a fit go meet with them in Italy why wine wine and dye them
you know you know what's wild like people are like oh you know that that must be you know you're blowing so much budget it's so expensive yeah once every six months we spend about $20,000 for all of us to get together in Italy for a week. You know, we do like scouting stuff for the game.
If you look at what we would spend if we had one small co-working space for half the team
be way more.
Yeah, that's in 3 months. It's done and you know, nobody's going in there and the coffee isn't that good anyway.
I We're saving so much money. Like I can't tell you how much savings remote has. I think I think return to office is such a scam. I really do. I don't know. Like look, some people love an office. Great. I get it. Fine. But
yeah,
they do. But you, like you said, you've designed your companies in a way where you want to work there for a long time. You want to grow there. You want to bring people that that are like-minded. And then, you know, some of them you weren't even necessarily looking for. They came and found you and created the role and said, "Hey, you need to hire me for this." And uh you you figured out a way. So, what what an incredible journey, Ran. So a as we start wrapping up here um you know a founder looking to build a company for the first time um you know in your book you also talk ideas execution other than reading your book uh lost and founder what what else should they they you know they they be doing and and think about when hiring their first person um and and and looking to build
go to therapy
oh my god go to therapy founders no I'm I'm 100% serious I don't anything you recommend online like what and or or like a business coach or actual like therapy therapy?
Yeah, I would say I would say professional therapist. I think that this this is if you can become a an emotionally mature and um thoughtful, introspective uh kind and generous person and you can understand your personality traits and where they come from and which ones you need to change and want to change and how to change them. nothing else will have as big an impact on the positivity of the company culture that you create. Um, you will get better at hiring. You'll get better at um letting people go. You'll get better at building process. You'll get better at forgiving yourself when things go wrong. Uh you will improve how you communicate with other people. you'll remove sort of the we all have these right these negative biases from our our childhoods or our histories or our genetics or what you know whatever that where we we're we do unhealthy things for unhealthy reasons and sometimes we know it and sometimes we don't and sometimes it's really hard for us to change um that resolving those things will make you such a better leader um and then and I I think the second thing I would do is think about that architecture like I would I would I would write it down and structure you know when we started Spark Toro Casey and I had these sort of things like what happens if what happens if the company is offered to sell for a bunch of money what happens if um the NRA wants to sign up for Spark Toro what happens if uh Rand gets hit by a bus you know what happens if um one of us isn't hit by a bus or or that hit by a bus means we can't work, but we're still, you know, around and wish we could participate. Like, how do we
how do we resolve those things? You know, heavy stuff. What What happens if there's a divorce?
Mhm. You asked all the hard questions up front.
All the hard questions upfront. Um, and thank God, you know, none of those terrible things have come to pass, but plenty of the plenty of the conversations that we had around those kinds of things have been hugely helpful in terms of just setting up the company for having like the infrastructure.
Yeah.
To make tough decisions without without it being contentious. That that is so beautiful.
Are you are you open sourcing these questions as well? So some of the the founders
in I think in the Spark Toro um foundation, you know, when I when I announced the company's funding, uh you can actually see those docs as well, including like a little handwritten notepad with all the notes that Casey and I took on like why do we think this company is important? What what's who's the product for and why is it for them and why do we want to build something for them instead of this other audience and
the manifesto?
Yeah. Yeah. But that architecture that architecture informs everything else.
Amazing. Rand, thank you so much. You've been more than generous with your time. So for those listening, you got to go set up uh an alert for at alertmouse.com.
It's free.
It's free. Uh your name, your company name, the bare minimum you should do there. Spark Toro audience engagement plat platform. And then how can folks play your video game launching from Zachar Studio? What's it called? When is it uh when exactly is it launching? I want to play this. Can I use it as a team building activity? I'm I'm very excited.
Sure. Yeah, why not? Um, so the snack bar at the end of the world is launching in 2027, probably the middle of the year, June, July. Uh, we will be announcing it between 6 and 9 months before launch. So, at that point, you'll be able to wishlist it on Steam and all that kind of stuff. In the meantime, if you want to sign up for the email list, just go to snackbarstudio.com and you can put in your email there. Um, and it it should be, I think, a really a really really fun game, especially for folks like you and I who enjoy a little more retro style.
Absolutely. Really excited to play it. Ran, thanks so much for being here.
Yeah, my pleasure, Luis. Thanks for having me.
