{"id":24644,"date":"2021-03-03T13:45:24","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T21:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/?p=24644"},"modified":"2022-01-24T17:43:47","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T01:43:47","slug":"a-conversation-with-envoy-founderceo-larry-gadea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/a-conversation-with-envoy-founderceo-larry-gadea\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Envoy Founder\/CEO Larry Gadea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our\u00a0ongoing series<\/a> in partnership with Entrepreneur<\/a>, If I Knew Then: <\/em>Leadership Lessons<\/a>, <\/em>sets the stage for a unique platform to host virtual fireside chats with high-profile CEOs<\/a> of major brands from Indeed<\/a> and Nextdoor<\/a> to GoDaddy<\/a>and DocuSign<\/a>. These insightful sessions allow successful leaders to be transparent as they share their insight, life experience, and lessons for both current and future entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

For the 15th episode of our\u00a0Leadership Lessons<\/u><\/a>\u00a0series, Comparably Co-Founder\/CEO Jason Nazar wanted to sit down with Envoy <\/a>founder\/CEO Larry Gadea who has now facilitated four million safe returns to the office. Envoy\u2019s tagline, we’re creating a world where workplaces work better,<\/em> is doing just that. With a suite of products that redefine how to welcome visitors and employees back to the office, the workplace platform includes tools for check-in registrations, booking meeting rooms and desks, managing deliveries, and capacity limits for social distancing. Envoy is used in more than 14,000 offices across 70 countries; including Slack, Pinterest, Warby Parker, Lionsgate, and L\u2019Oreal. Gadea\u2019s early investors include Silicon Valley bigwigs like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Quora\u2019s Adam D\u2019Angelo, and Yelp\u2019s Jeremy Stoppelman to well-known industry VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Initialized Capital. Gadea\u2019s story and lessons learned are not to be missed, from escaping communist Romania to being recruited as one of Google’s youngest software engineers at the age of 17 to joining Twitter as one of its first 50 employees.<\/p>\n

Gadea\u2019s\u00a0early childhood years began\u00a0with a border crossing\u00a0out of\u00a0his homeland.\u00a0He was smuggled out of\u00a0communist Romania\u00a0in\u00a0the backseat of his parents\u2019 car\u00a0to settle in Germany for a few years before his family officially settled in Ottawa, Canada. Despite having\u00a0Master\u2019s degrees and esteemed careers\u00a0in Romania,\u00a0his\u00a0parents had to start over by working\u00a0blue-collar jobs; his\u00a0mother cleaned houses and his father picked berries. Gadea utilized\u00a0his parents’\u00a0sacrifice\u00a0and\u00a0work ethic\u00a0as\u00a0his\u00a0models\u00a0of\u00a0success.\u00a0It has helped him rise to\u00a0many of life\u2019s\u00a0challenges, with the\u00a0biggest\u00a0one\u00a0facing\u00a0his career last year.<\/p>\n

After spending seven years\u00a0creating products\u00a0to\u00a0help\u00a0modernize\u00a0visitor experiences for physical offices,\u00a0the pandemic\u00a0clearly\u00a0hurt Envoy\u2019s core business.<\/p>\n

Gadea says of his company: \u201cWe create products that are great visitor experiences, that\u2019s how a lot of people know us. Last year was definitely a challenge, but we used it to rethink how we would unify the office under one platform,like an OS for the workplace where we weave together all of the moving parts.\u201d Those moving parts now include making workplaces safer in the midst of the pandemic, and bridging COVID protocols together so that people can continue to produce meaningful work. This pivot and expansion of products was critical to not only Envoy\u2019s business, it benefited so many organizations who needed to safely re-open in this new world.<\/p>\n

These are the 12 main takeaways Gadea shared with Nazar during the hour-long conversation:<\/p>\n

1.)\u00a0When you run a company, it\u2019s important <\/strong>to<\/strong> trust people. You have to trust them and <\/strong>tell <\/em><\/strong>them that you trust them. <\/strong>Philosophical words like this have helped guide Gadea, and he stresses that it is the second part of this common piece of advice that a lot of people miss.<\/p>\n

2.)\u00a0Innovate and build faster to stay relevant. <\/strong>With the pandemic constraining companies, Gadea took the chance to pivot and modify his service. \u201cIt made us think strongly about what can we do to help <\/em>and what can we be building for this?<\/em> It was an opportunity to become more relevant in helping people while fostering safety. We have never innovated faster or built faster than We are building for the entire workforce and this has been an exciting muscle to exercise.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

3.) Never even slightly lower the bar when you\u2019re hiring. <\/strong>When your company is small, the people you hire are the people that your company becomes. It\u2019s the people that you hire in the early days that define what kind of companyyou want to be. What is your company value? What kind of people does your company hire? Never compromise on ta A company is its people.<\/p>\n

4.)\u00a0Encourag<\/strong>ing<\/strong> and promot<\/strong>ing<\/strong> ownership retains great employees.<\/strong> Gadea says you can\u2019t retain excitement in employees if you are just cloning something that already exists. His guidelines for hiring great employees not only applies to what he looks for in engineers, it can be applicable to any industry: Look for team members who are not there just because it\u2019s a job or a paycheck and find people who want to master their craft. People who have adesire to learn more about what they\u2019re doing and can show evidence of this demonstrates how much pride they have in the work.<\/p>\n

5.) Employees need to know that if it breaks, you will have their <\/strong> Make a point to communicate with employees that they are owners of their projects, not just \u201cworking for the man\u201d. When employees step up and do something risky, they also need to know that you will have their back if it breaks or doesn\u2019t go as planned.<\/p>\n

6.)\u00a0Have<\/strong> humility <\/strong>when <\/strong>you<\/strong> see<\/strong> something doesn\u2019t work<\/strong> and don\u2019t be afraid to ask for help<\/strong>. <\/strong>There is no shame in admitting that you are wrong, need to pivot a project, or need a little Gadea says that it is ok when you see that something isn\u2019t working: \u201cYou just need to communicate when and what isn\u2019t working so that others can help you and surprise! Others do <\/em>want to help you.\u201d<\/p>\n

7.)\u00a0As a CEO, you need to assume you are the company\u2019s #1 salesperson. <\/strong>If you can raise money, you are good at sales. <\/strong>And once you build a product that can sell itself with a clear product roadmap, have the confidence to scale up to a real sales<\/p>\n

8.)\u00a0The product or service needs to sell itself, and be self-serviceable.<\/strong> Gadea believes the key to SaaS sales is having a large portion defined by what the customers are asking for and offer multiple pricing plans. If you want to scale your business, it is important to include a low price, self-serve product that enables all people to access the service online without a sales team pitching them. Why? Because it can be difficult in an enterprise business to access the decision-maker and sell to them directly. Gadea shares that even after Envoy implemented a tiered pricing plan, with increased fees, \u201cCustomers stuck with us because our business now had value.\u201d<\/p>\n

9.)\u00a0Think<\/strong> holistic<\/strong>ally<\/strong> instead of just checking boxes. <\/strong>If Gadea could go back in time knowing what he knows now with COVID, he says, \u201cI would have focused on holistically thinking about how and why things work to increase innovation. Building this all-encompassing \u2018thing\u2019 with more products that will actually be used by everyone as opposed to doubling down on our visitor products.\u201d<\/p>\n

10.) Don\u2019t<\/strong> fall into the trap of building things that don\u2019t apply to a larger audience. <\/strong>From his experience of building products tailor made for customers that often go unused, Gadea now asks himself, Is this something enough of our customers are going to use <\/em>and what are we going to build that has the largest utility for the most customers?<\/em> This helps save time and removes the complexity of problem solving by trying to reach every individual customer.<\/p>\n

11.)\u00a0Try to be less terrible at communication. <\/strong>Social communications are often lost when we are working remotely and are separate. When everyone is remote, it\u2019s easy for employees to experience paranoia by other colleagues and the company. Engaging in constant communication helps offset this issue. One of Gadea\u2019s best practices for fueling communications is to have a weekly show-and-tell for an hour where employees show off cool products that they have worked on that week. But, more importantly, what they are really <\/em>show-and-telling are their core values. Gadea shares that another fun alternative his team has used to get people together is through a video chat virtual world like Topia.<\/p>\n

12.)\u00a0The ability to collaborate is what\u00a0will\u00a0define\u00a0companies\u00a0in the future.<\/strong>When it comes to the future of work over the next 10 years,\u00a0Gadea says it’s important for companies to ask themselves, “Do we\u00a0have\u00a0the right tools\u00a0and mindset to function being\u00a0in a\u00a0remote or hybrid\u00a0work environment?”\u00a0Whether employees are at home, offsite, or in your headquarters, organizations need the most innovative tools to\u00a0collaborate\u00a0seamlessly.<\/p>\n

Watch the full webinar<\/a> to learn more about how Larry Gadea brings more humanity to business with insights, tools and strategies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our\u00a0ongoing series in partnership with Entrepreneur, If I Knew Then: Leadership Lessons, sets the stage for a unique platform to host virtual fireside chats with high-profile CEOs of major brands from Indeed and Nextdoor to GoDaddyand DocuSign. These insightful sessions allow successful leaders to be transparent as they share their insight, life experience, and lessons … Read full-story <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":24646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2474],"tags":[2503],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26478,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24644\/revisions\/26478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}