Finder

Employee #3 at Finder US

I was recruited in the fall of 2016 to build the Publishing & Editorial department at Finder. What a ride. I’m grateful to every team member that took a leap of faith to join a motley crew of young, ambitious, talented creators.

We chose to go remote-first in 2016 (well before the pandemic), for a few reasons:

1. We had to build a team of world-class talent on a startup budget.

2. I needed to hire at a volume that far outpaced the availability of high-caliber talent in NYC – and our office space.

3. And I was already remote, building a team from a cabin in the high desert mountains of rural San Diego county.

If I can lead a team from out there, at the end of a dirt road with a cell phone booster, my team should be able to work from anywhere.

Scale, velocity, and structure

Some call this “building the plane as we’re flying it.” With no HR and no recruiter, we were left to create every single piece of the recruiting and onboarding ourselves, choosing to immediately enterprise our work with documented process and steps, knowing that as we brought on mid-level managers we’d be able to scale.

We interviewed hundreds of people, wrote hundreds of job ads, reviewed hundreds of trials and made offers, onboarded employees, and trained trainers. Then came the SOPs and internal documentation to match, expanding a knowledge base of proprietary tactics as fast as we were scaling 100s of tests.

Empowering people

I'm addicted to building ego-less teams that tirelessly look out for their crew mates. By celebrating risks and mistakes, we protect psychological safety and empower the kind of collaboration that drives innovation. Each employee is committed to growing their skills, and together they create exceptional content that helps guide people through complicated decisions. 

Respect > Likability

My former reports will tell you I’m the “best boss they ever had and the hardest boss they ever had”, demonstrated by having high manager ratings and longer-than-average retention of employees on my team, as well as consistently hitting huge goals and fostering strong work ethic. I’m a driver, a coach, and an empathetic supporter. I have a knack for process and intuition for finding patterns in data. 

Still going strong

At the end of my tenure, Finder raised a Series A of $35M, had 55 full time employees in publishing, over 50,000 pages on the website, over 1,000+ affiliate partners, and millions of dollars in revenue.