Brian O’Malley

Some of my best companies, Coupa, for example, was an early investment of mine, wasn't really liked within the partnership, but it was something that a few people were supporters and we ultimately made that investment and ended up being really impactful to the Battery Funds.

And so I think thinking about how can you tie compensation to the people who go out on a limb a little bit and actually make the investments that drive the returns.

To summarize, it's twofold.

One, it's really deciding what are the North Stars across the entire organization and making sure that everyone is aligned there.

And then two, having the rewards be set up in a way where if you have a junior person who did a great deal, they're not going to be looking to leave because sticking around, they're actually going to get paid on that.

As well as if you have a senior person who maybe didn't lead the deal, but spent a lot of time shepherding that junior person and helping them win something that was ultimately important.

I love the idea of the incentives being team oriented and team aligned because that's going to create a better culture naturally along the way.

Such a good answer.

So one is you have to just assume, just have to get out of your mind that...

People will do anything that they're not incentivized towards.

So start with this kind of ground truth.

You have to go incentives.

And the next part is before you start going into incentives, what do you want to do and what do you want to incentivize?

It sounds like a simple question, but it's contextual to your market position.

There's a game theory to what is your North Star, and then you build around that theory

kind of North Star that's differentiated from other venture firms.

And then you incentivize around that.

So it kind of starts with the strategy and then incentive base.

And then you have to look for things like the inputs versus outputs.

In other words, are we going to incentivize the processes like doing the right thing?