Inside Nest: Cofounder Matt Rogers Reveals What He Looks for in a Candidate

Just what does it take to start a company of your own? “It’s one of the hardest, but yet the most rewarding decisions a person can make,” Nest cofounder Matt Rogers told me at the IFA tech show in Berlin. And he should know.

Rogers cofounded Nest Labs, the maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors, in 2010 with Apple executive Tony Fadell. Rogers, who was responsible for iPod software development at Apple, is now co-founder and VP of engineering at Nest. Rogers sat down with me at IFA to talk about leadership, culture, and what he looks for in a new hire.

What did you and Tony look for in building a team to bring to Nest?

First and foremost is passion. So, especially in the early days before we had a product, before we had a brand, anything, before we had money to even pay people, the biggest thing was finding people who believed in what we were going to do and who wanted to be on that team and had the passion for products in the space that we were in.

And not everybody had that, we spoke to a lot of folks who were great engineers and great designers, but didn't have the belief that you could build a thermostat company.

In the end, passion goes a long way especially when starting an early company.

You came from Apple which is very different from the company you started. How did you decide your management structure and how things would work?

In the early days, we wanted to hire seed crystals, folks we could build teams around, so not necessarily an executive. But we hired people who we knew had a lot of leadership potential, could lead a project, could lead a team and hired a seed crystal per area; one from marketing, one for product development, one for product design.

And we built teams around those individuals and, eventually, a lot of those leaders became the executives that are running the company today. We wanted to hire people who could kind of span the whole stack, who could be hands-on but also kind of step back and drive the strategy too.

So what makes you look at someone and determine whether they have leadership skills?

A lot of it is communication and being able to articulate what should be done, how and why. Listening skills are actually really important; a lot of people think of leaders as someone who can bark orders, but that’s actually not leadership. Leadership is being able to listen and understand and then be able to be the sounding board, and we look for that kind of balance.

 

How can someone convey those attributes on paper?

Generally, what we look for in leaders is not necessarily management. people say I want to be a manager, I want to be a leader--management and leadership are not the same.  Having looked at a lot of resumes (probably looked at tens of thousands of resumes over my career), we look for people who have driven large areas of development.

They’ve led a feature, thought through the creation of something and they’ve seen it through. So, I think when we think about what it takes to build products or build services, it's really kind of the seeing it through.

Ideas are cheap, execution is really hard, so what we look for is people who have done the end-to-end.

Is there something that makes one person's resume stand out - something that they do or say?

One of the things I like to look for in resumes is dedication to one specific area or product or company for more than a couple years. I often see resumes where people have a different job every year or every two years. I find those a little less interesting because I’m looking for someone who's got passion for seeing something through.

Tell me about your Nestling program for interns.

I was an intern at Apple once and I got my career started as an intern. Many of our employees got their starts as interns and it’s a great way of trying out the next generation. It’s hard to look at a new grad resume because they’re all pretty much the same. It’s a great way to bring in fresh talent who have new ideas.

They teach totally different things in school now than they did when I was in school. We think of internships as like a three-month interview with actual real work. We had about 60 interns this summer and they did great work. One of our interns built an entirely new algorithm that we’re going to be shipping next year...they did amazing work. Many of them are returning back full time next year.

Best interview advice for a startup founder?

I would say the decision-making that goes into your first 10 hires is way more important than people realize, those decisions albeit are never set in stone, will shape the company that you become.

Those decisions should be made very, very carefully, not just for how great that engineer is, how technically strong they are but can they be part of a company that’s 500 people in a few years. Can they lead teams, are they going to be a great beacon of culture and personality for the other people you bring in because as you onboard, your early employees are the ones who are going to teach them what the company is all about.

 

Top photo by Andrea Smith. All other photos by Nest.