How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach)

**Matt Mochary** (0:00)
The biggest marker that I've seen between a botched layoff and a successful layoff is at the moment someone hears that they no longer have a job, did they hear it from their manager in a one-on-one? If that's when they heard it, it'll be okay. But if they heard it in an email, in a group chat, in any kind of thing where they were sitting next to or they were hearing it along with other people, it wasn't personalized, it wasn't one-on-one, that is terrible. And that's when people get really angry. And that's when they start going on to Twitter and going to newspapers and et cetera.
Because it feels dehumanizing. It feels like you didn't give a shit about me. You didn't even have the courtesy to tell me to my face. And of course, there's no way to allow that person to express their emotions because they're in a group.
So that's the most important thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:08)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my aim here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Matt Mochary. Matt is a full-time executive coach, but not just any coach. He's worked with folks like Naval, the CEOs of OpenAI, Coinbase, Reddit, Rippling, Fair, Front, Notion. The list goes on. He's also coached partners at VCs like Sequoia, YC, Benchmark, many others. We are so fortunate that Matt agreed to join me on this podcast. In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground. We talk about why learning to fire people is one of the most important skills as a leader and how to do it well, why anger and fear often point you in the exact opposite direction you should be going, how to innovate within a larger company, how his coaching has evolved over the years, where the most successful founders still struggle, and so much more. This may be my new favorite episode and I bet it will be yours too. So much real talk with tactics, templates, all kinds of goodness. Enjoy this conversation with Matt Mochary.
This episode is brought to you by Assembly AI. If you're looking to build powerful AI-powered features in your audio or video products, then you need to know about Assembly AI. Assembly AI is the API platform for state-of-the-art AI models that thousands of product-led growth companies like Spotify, Loom, and CallRail are using to infuse AI into their products. With simple APIs, developers and PMs can get access to powerful AI models for transcription, summarization, and dozens of other tasks that are fast, secure, and production-ready. All of their models are researched and trained in-house and continuously updated by their team of AI experts, which, for a PM, makes it easy to build and ship new AI-powered features. Product teams at startups and enterprises are using Assembly AI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics and podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken, redact PII from audio videos, and way more. Visit assemblyai.com to try Assembly AI's API for free and start testing their models in their no-code playground. That's assemblyai.com.
This episode is brought to you by lemon.io. You've achieved product market fit, you're able to activate, engage, and retain your customers, but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as you want to, because it's hard to find great engineers quickly, especially if you're trying to protect your burn rate. Meet lemon.io. lemon.io will quickly match you with skilled senior developers who are all vetted, results-oriented, and ready to help you grow, and all that at competitive rates.
Startups choose lemon.io because they offer only hand-picked developers with three or more years of experience and strong, proven portfolios. Only 1% of Canada to apply get in, so you can be sure that they offer you only high-quality talent.
And if something ever goes wrong, lemon.io offers you a swift replacement so that you're kind of hiring with a warranty. To learn more, just go to lemon.io/lenny and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And if you start the process now, you can claim a special discount exclusively for Lenny's Podcast listeners, 15% off your first four weeks of working with your new software developer. Grow faster with an extra pair of hands. Visit lemon.io/lenny.
Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Matt Mochary** (4:47)
Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:49)
I'm looking forward to it even more. The way I learned about you is back in the day, I read this book called The Great CEO Within, which I have right here. And I was like, holy moly, this is the most tactical, practical, useful book I've seen for leaders. I need to tell everyone about it. And I did.