From 3-Year Plans to 90-Day Sprints: Quince's CPO on Building Teams in the AI Era

**Matt Jahansouz** (0:00)
It's almost unacceptable at this stage of the game. It would be like if I refused to use email. If you're not thinking about the counter when you're constructing the original offer, you're one, making yourself vulnerable for that person to just get that counter, take it on the spot, and now you've lost them and it was all for naught. You should be spending your time on how to do 10X. And so allocate your time, and therefore the leadership team that you need underneath you to allow you to do that.

**Jen Holmstrom** (0:21)
In a world where AI is rewriting the rules of work faster than anyone predicted, how do you build a team that doesn't just keep up but sets the pace? Matt Jahansouz is the Chief People Officer of Quince, the manufacturer to consumer brand redefining how luxury essentials are made and sold. From $50 cashmere sweaters to premium bedding, Quince has crossed $1 billion in revenue and a $10.1 billion valuation. We'll explore why Quince treats AI resistance as a deal breaker, the detailed playbook behind closing elite talent in a bidding war, and why founders should stop solving two X problems and start thinking about 10X.
As part of our limited series on talent in AI, we explore how leaders are building teams for an AI driven world. Today, we're excited to be joined by Matt Jahansouz. Matt, thanks for joining us.

**Matt Jahansouz** (1:10)
It's good to be here.

**Jen Holmstrom** (1:11)
To start us off, if you were advising a founder who is building a company from the ground up today, how would you tell them to structure their people organization differently than you would have five, three, even two years ago?

**Matt Jahansouz** (1:25)
It's a good question.
I think there's a couple of different things that I probably focus on. I think one, sometimes there can be a view of, I'll hire my people leader a little bit later. I'll figure it out until then or I don't really need a senior person. And so you delay it and convince yourself that either you don't need it or you want to run it yourself, or you can use like external folks to help you with recruiting. And I think the earlier you get the right leader in, who can help you think about talent in a different way, get different folks to the table, help you kind of take ideas around what you want your culture to be and put it into practice. That's just an important thought partner to have early.
So don't delay kind of the senior people leader that you know you'll eventually need. I think maybe related to that, sometimes it's easy to hire a junior person and they will quickly be kind of overwhelmed with admin and maybe a process facilitator when you think about recruiting more than anything else. And I think you're just not gonna get maximum value out of what that seat could be. So I would go, I would certainly think about recruiting HR separately, particularly at that stage. I would be looking for a seasoned exec recruiter who understands the space and the key roles and could put in process, but be out there really representing your company and getting top talent. And it makes sense in a world where, again, sometimes you maybe want to save money and hire more junior person, but then you end up spending a significant amount of money on external search firms. And so having that in-house expertise who understands your company and culture and your context and can recruit people in, I just think that's invaluable. And similarly on the HR side, again, a person can really help you think through org design and onboard your leaders and start to set up performance management practices. The earlier you get those things right, I just think the company and the culture benefits tremendously.

**Jen Holmstrom** (3:23)
I could not agree with you more.
And workforce planning is of course a hot topic out there today with people trying to forecast. How would you advise leadership teams to think about workforce planning when it's genuinely unclear what roles will exist?

**Matt Jahansouz** (3:40)
Workforce planning is tough. It's constantly changing. I've never seen it done perfectly and I don't even know that that's possible, particularly in hyper growth or kind of early stage where just so much is changing so quickly. And so trying to predict what you're going to need three years from now, it's almost wasted time. And so I think pull up the timeline a bit, try and break things down maybe into a six or 12 month focus of, what are the priority roles that I need today to help run this company? Then think about roles in terms of, there's going to be some just foundational talent, skill set, teams that you need to survive to get the day-to-day done. You're going to need some talent that are going to be focused on growth, and maybe some that are maybe more strategic. And so how you categorize talent and roles, I think will help you understand what you need to go get first, and which are maybe exciting, but you can probably put off a little bit into the future until you get some of these other things. I think prioritization is maybe the most important. Sometimes you'll go in and see a given leader who's come in and is running 37 different searches. There's just no way even if you as the leader are trying to spread yourself across 37 different searches because you want to meet each of those candidates. And so it's, what are your top five? And go give those the focus and the attention that they need and get those done.