LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Alexa Grabell - Co-Founder & CEO at Pocus

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a revenue data platform purpose-built for go-to-market teams. Pocus helps analyse, visualise and action data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion—without relying on engineers.

Alexa and Pocus work with companies like Miro, Webflow, Loom, and Superhuman, with backing from First Round Capital, Coatue, GTM Fund, and executives from Datadog, Notion, Figma and more. Alexa’s passion for democratising data began when she led sales strategy & operations at Dataminr, where she built internal solutions to power sales teams with data.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

As CEO, my job boils down to a few key things that I spend the most time thinking about, first, is setting the short term and long term vision and mission for the company as a whole. Next is for me to sell that vision to customers, investor, and our team. While also, helping drive that tactically by supporting key projects across product, marketing, or sales.

I try and block my days to minimize context switching, for example, I do all my calls with direct reports on the same day back to back.

A typical slate of calls every week might include; meetings with leads and prospects, catching up with with existing customers, internal team calls, Pocus community events and some investors relations. A typical Friday is back to back and usually includes at least one scheduling conflict.

How do you build culture?

I think one of the most important things is to set clear values. The process for creating values should be ever-evolving. The first set of values were solely built by my co-founder and I, the version we have now was created by the team.

At our first offsite we wrote down what made each member of the team uniquely good at what they did - we synthesized the takeaways into our values. One of our most recent hires said something during her interview process that really stuck with me: “I can tell all of you genuinely like each other.”

When hiring, we very intentionally screen for culture in the interview process. Every role has a culture interview where we are screening for these values. We also use the opportunity to explicitly share what it’s like working at Pocus, how these values manifest so there’s mutual alignment.

By doing this we set clear expectations on how we work as a company to embody those values. We built an extensive how WE work and how YOU work guide in Notion that we send to employees before they join so theres strong alignment on expectations.

It’s important also to fire fast for culture mis-alignment. It’s tempting to just let culture misalignment slide, especially if the hire is great at what they do - this is dangerous at any size. If you want a strong culture, you have to reinforce values.

And we reward the team often. Specifically those members embodying what makes our culture great. We call these value awards and we give them out monthly during all hands. We also encourage the entire team to post in our #kudos channel in Slack to highlight these wins.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

Our process is simple. First, for every role we look at our networks first—VCs, friends of Pocus, employees—we offer a bonus to Pocus employees—this is our best way to find great talent, fast.

While we are doing this marketing helps promote the role on our social channels. Our hiring posts are some of the best performing on LinkedIn. Something we are super proud of! Once we find the potential hires we move into out interview process which looks like the following.

First we use a ‘Jobs To Be Done’ framework to build a clear scorecard for each role. This removes ambiguity from the interview loop. We are also careful to make sure everyone’s voice is heard from the interview process—various of personas should be part of the interview loop. It’s helpful to get a gut check cross departments.

We also like to use take home tests during the interview process. This is in order to test a few things. We’re big into documentation. If you can’t articulate your ideas clearly in written form, Pocus will be a hard place to work. We’re early-stage, so we need do-ers. If someone is unwilling to spend a couple of hours on a take-home chances are they’ll struggle to do in the weeds work.

We’re not just asking for answers also, but rather we want you to show us how you think. It can be hard to really understand how someone thinks in an interview. How each candidate might answer the same questions with the same context differently gives you a window into how they reason. Finally we make sure to never lower the bar—we much rather hire slowly rather than hire the wrong person.

On perseverance

How do you set goals?

The North Star for our company gets set once or twice per year. This then informs how we set quarterly and monthly OKRs. Based on the North Star we set monthly OKRs. This may seem too frequent but as a startup things are often moving to quickly. Quarterly OKRs might keep us stuck doing the wrong things for too long. We’re constantly experimenting, learning, and iterating.

For us it’s important to tie each OKR to a team and an owner on the leadership team, be that marketing, product, CS, sales, engineering. Once we have our OKRs we review them together weekly to discuss what is working and is not. Then we set the next months OKRs by running a retrospective of the previous month and looking at how we stay on track for our revenue goals for the year.

What is your North Star metric inside if your company? And why?

The first half of 2023 our North Star was to have a 'Cult Following.' We define this as ‘so much customer love that the words customer love don't do it justice.’ Some companies we used as examples of having cult following are Notion, Figma, Superhuman, Linear, Canva, and Slack. We translated what this meant for each of our teams.

For example, the marketing team translated this into ‘our community members and prospects feel committed to Pocus and the Product-Led Sales movement.’ Marketing's inspiration was Notion's community and how some community members waited hours in line outside in the rain to get Notion swag.

The reason this is our North Star is that as a category creator, community-led growth and evangelism are key driving forces for us, especially in these first few years. Our goals as a company need to be aligned at this level so that each individual function can prioritize their work and choose goals and KPIs that support the overall objective.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

We’re currently hybrid as a result of starting the company during COVID, so everyone is everywhere. But there is definitely appetite for in person. To support hybrid we have a few rituals to keep the team connected, such as; quarterly off-sites for the entire team to work together in person, weekly team hangouts in Zoom for more casual time and promoting a culture where folks in cities with more people, like SF and New York, can go and hang out.

Even though Pocus is a remote company, we take every chance we get to meet in person. And every time we do, I’m reminded of how important, and fun, face-time is. I’m so proud of the team we’re building and super excited about all the plans we’ve laid out for the future.

And that's it! You can follow Alexa on LinkedIn here and check out Pocus if you are looking for a solution for your GTM teams.