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20VC: The Most Successful Companies Are Not Where Employees Work The Most, How To Know When To Promote From Below Or Bring in External Candidates & Why It Is A Unique Advantage To Be Building A Company Outside A Tech Hub with Rick Nucci, Founder & CEO @ G

Jan 24, 2020

Rick Nucci, Co-founder and CEO of Guru, shares insights on building successful companies outside traditional tech hubs like San Francisco. He emphasizes the importance of a strong company culture, adapting values during growth, and effective hiring practices. Nucci discusses his leadership evolution, advocating for empathy and transparency while navigating challenges. He believes that promoting from within fosters a positive atmosphere and highlights the unique advantages of operating in non-tech locations for talent acquisition and growth.

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ANECDOTE

Guru's Origin

Rick Nucci's second company, Guru, arose from his experience at Boomi and Dell.
Existing knowledge management systems failed, leading to expert burnout and the birth of Guru.

INSIGHT

Boomi's Accidental Culture

Boomi's early culture, while unintentionally good, taught Rick Nucci valuable lessons.
This inspired him to bring those learnings to Guru, creating a more intentional and positive environment.

INSIGHT

Positioning is Key

Boomi's early struggles with positioning against large incumbents taught Rick the importance of clear messaging.
This led him to prioritize bringing talented individuals to Guru to focus on this aspect.

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Rick Nucci is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Guru, the knowledge management platform that delivers everything you need so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. To date, Rick has raised over $38m with Guru from some of the best in the business including Thrive, Emergence Capital, Firstmark, Slack and Salesforce. Prior to Guru, Rick was the Founder of Boomi, which defined and led a new segment as the first-ever cloud integration platform-as-a-service. Boomi was ultimately acquired by Dell where Rick went on to grow the organisation into the industry leader it is today.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Rick made his way into the world of startups originally and how he came to change the way we think about knowledge management with his founding of Guru?

2.) How would Rick describe his leadership style today? How has he seen his style change over the years? What have been those learnings and the inflexion points causing them? Does Rick believe can be learned as a leader? What does he recommend to founders wanting to become more empathetic?

3.) Culture is a fluffy and overused term, what does it mean to Rick? What has Rick done to purposefully build a very specific culture that he wanted to create? What specific initiatives have worked well? What have not worked so well? How does Rick think about culture maintenance with scale? What are the challenges with scaling culture?

4.) How does Rick think about the interview process when adding to the team at Guru? How do they literally structure it? What does their culture interview encompass? How heavily is it weighted? What specific questions do they ask and responses they look for? If it does not work out, what have been Rick's biggest lessons on letting people go?

5.) Rick is based in Philadelphia, often people say if you are not in a tech hub it is not possible to get the best talent, does Rick agree with this? In what roles does it make sense to hire from a tech hub for? What are the advantages of hiring outside of a hub? Fundraising wise, does Rick believe you have to have a presence in a core hub to raise from Tier 1 VCs?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Rick’s Fave Book: The 9 Types of Leadership: Mastering the Art of People in the 21st Century Workplace

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rick on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.