The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I generally value the reference check over interview signals. If I had the stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal, the reference check is the top of the list. Those people, they work with this person sometimes for years. Their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios, it's just like never going to compare what a good reference check will give you.
Shishir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda. Before starting Coda, Shishir led the YouTube product engineering and design teams at Google, where he spent over six years. Before that, he spent six years at Microsoft. He's also on the board of Spotify. As you'll hear in this episode, Shishir is an incredibly deep and very first principles thinker on all kinds of topics. And in this episode, we cover growth strategy, specifically a framework that he calls Blue Loops and Black Loops. We talk about the rituals of great teams, something that Shishir has been passionate about and has been collecting from all of the best leaders in tech for the past two years, and which will soon turn into a book. We talk about Eigenquestions, which is not a German game show. He shares how he evaluates product talent and gives some really great advice on doing reference checks. We go into so many other topics. This is the longest episode that I've recorded yet, and you'll see why. Shishir is so full of wisdom, and we could have kept going for at least another hour.
And so, with that, I bring you Shishir Mehrotra.
Hey, Casey Winters, what do you love about Coda?

**Casey Winters** (1:29)
Coda is a company that's actually near and dear to my heart because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, you know I love loops. And Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a Coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be how you create OKRs, run annual planning, build your roadmap, whatever.
Every one of those Codas can then be easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally wrote it. So they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops, which is something I'm personally passionate about.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:05)
I actually use Coda myself every day. It's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation.

**Casey Winters** (2:11)
I use it for first drafts, organize my content calendar, to plan each podcast episode and so many more things.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:17)
Coda is giving listeners this podcast $1,000 in free credit off their first statement.

**Casey Winters** (2:22)
Just go to coda.io/lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:26)
That's coda.io/lenny.
Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (2:38)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:39)
And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (2:42)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:02)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing longterm retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (3:16)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Squares, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:32)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
Shishir, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me. I don't think I've actually shared this with you, but you're actually the very first CEO that I've had on this podcast. I actually have a rule of no founders or CEOs on the podcast, at least at this point. And you're the first person that I've let break this rule. And so how does that feel?
I've always been a rule breaker.
Perfect.
So bio for listeners, just briefly. So you're the founder and CEO of Coda. You spend six years at Google, where you're a VP of Product and Engineering for YouTube, basically leading the YouTube product team. Spend six years at Microsoft. You're on Spotify's board of directors. You're also a prolific online writer. And that leads to my first question, which is, I hear that at Coda, there's a contest internally for people who actually, so maybe a little context, you encourage people to write a lot of stuff externally within Coda, you want people to be writing. And you have this contest of who gets the most views and likes of people internally. And so is that true and who's winning?