Torsten Reil

speaker

213 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Dec 2024

Torsten Reil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · 11 Dec 2024 podcast

First of all, we don't have a large number of small teams. We have, I would say, a handful that work on particular projects. And then sometimes you rally around something and it can become a little bit bigger. That's happened over the last few months as we were working on particular projects. But what we try to do is identify areas that we know needs to exist. We put a small team on it.

We try to allow people to self-select as well, obviously, so that you have a team that communicates well, that is highly performant, and then they work on the task. And they may actually move off it eventually, and another team takes over. But that's worked really well for us.

First of all, I think you need to want to performance manage. Performance management is exhausting. You have to have difficult conversations with people. Sometimes they work out and they become better. Sometimes you decide to part ways. First of all, you have to have the mindset that this is necessary for a company. Do you need to do one-on-ones? No, I don't do any one-on-ones work for people.

I think that I'm used to them that have structured them properly and that work with people who need guidance in their development. The people I work with are usually senior and don't need that much guidance. If I need a one-to-one with them every week, I think something's probably going wrong. I also think that there is a tendency for one-on-ones to clog up the calendar. You have a lot of them.

You tend to repeat a lot of things. I used to do them religiously, by the way. I just stopped doing them. It hasn't had a negative impact.

Yeah, so this is something I noticed when I was mainly angel investing in startups is that eventually you get a certain number of people who are not a good fit for the company and they clog up the system, the company. They make everything harder. They create pockets of unhappiness because they feel maybe neglected or not understood or they don't fit into the culture.

And you kind of tolerate it quite often as a founder. You tolerate it up to a point where you think, this doesn't feel like my company anymore. Like, what happened? That happened to me at Natural Motion, by the way, at some point. And it's really painful for a founder.

But the reality is that if you want to counteract that, you have to make performance management one of the main things that you do from the beginning. You have to commit to it early on. And that means that you have to do the performance management. But probably as importantly, you have to also do what we call performance management calibration with all the leaders.

So what we do at Helsing is that every quarter we get one cohort, so one quarter of the leaders together, and they go through all the performance ratings that they gave their people and their teams.

And then the leadership team listens to it and gives feedback, not necessarily on the person, but actually to the way they rate the performance and help them calibrate it against what good looks like at Helsing, either because they've been too harsh or vice versa, because they've been too lenient.

And we do this religiously and it creates a culture of, I think, a well-calibrated performance system. And you need that because otherwise you end up with a lot of unfairness and also with not enough scrutiny, to be honest. When you put someone on a performance improvement plan, it does not work from there.

I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well, on a performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.

Helsing Speed is something that I nicked from Zynga. Zynga had Zynga Speed. And Helsing Speed is basically... Incredibly creative. Very creative. And we, as the founders, felt very early on that speed was one of the most important things. When we started, I mean, a couple of things. When we started, we wanted to be fast because we needed to be fast. We had to catch up.

I mean, it felt already, we started the company in 2021, that something was brewing, the geopolitical kind of tectonic plates were shifting, and we felt that we had no time to lose. The reason we raised quite a bit of money from the beginning was because we wanted to make sure that we could be fast, and speed became one of the main things for us.

So everyone's aware of blitzscaling, the book, but you can summarize it quite quickly. There are sometimes situations when capital is available where it's okay to be inefficient so that you can be effective, basically. and very fast. And we embraced it from the beginning. We tried to get recruitment up and running really quickly, which was crucial for performance culture.

You need to basically always have pressure on the pipeline of good people coming in in order to be able to manage other people out and so that you end up with a pool of people that are amazing. And so we wanted to shortcut that and found a third party that I wouldn't say overstaffed, but staffed very well so that we could get people in. Did a whole bunch of other things just to be fast.

Knowing that eventually we needed to settle at a different kind of level and not be inefficient, but be efficient and effective at the same time.

So I think you need to make a commitment early on that it is usually a temporary period. We wanted to do it for the first six to 12 months. So with recruitment, for example, we used a great third party and then eventually we moved into in-house. How much did you raise for your first round?

So the seed was 8.5 million euros, but then we were lucky to have Daniel Eck and Prima Materia invest 100 million euros four months later or so.

Well, Daniel came into the seat round. He was an investor in our seat round, the eight and a half million. And within two or three months, I think he developed so much conviction that he asked, like, I would like to lead your series A, how much money do you need? And I said, ideally, 100 million euros. And he gave us the money through Pure Materia, who've been amazing to work with.

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