SAS Institute

And that is in the Fortune Tech top five companies in their study of what the best places are to work.

You'd find Google, SAS Institute, NetApp, Zappos, et cetera.

You would find that, in fact, the comparative stock market returns for these companies is actually three times that of their competitors.

In other words, the best places to work that create great culture have 3x the performance on the stock market of the people that don't care about it.

And by the way, lifestyle businesses are not necessarily small.

To give you an example, there's a company that's about a $2 billion lifestyle business, maybe some of you have heard of it, called SAS Institute.

There's a fellow called Goodnight who has a very nice lifestyle, trust me.

His wife built a hotel nearby that I happen to stay at regularly.

Uh, I'm based out of New York, and Dan was living in New York at the time, um, when we first, uh, were working together in IBM and, uh, and since then Dan has moved back down to where he's from in North Carolina.

Yeah, and just some of the key stops along the way, uh, after IBM, I, uh, went into SAS Institute, Shawn went to MuleSoft, pre-Salesforce acquisition.

Uh, we started to see the, the power of the API, the power of integration, unlocking all of this data for what now became known as, as AI.

Uh, after that, we went into Elastic.

Um, and so real shout out to those people, right? They, they really were the ones that, um, reinforced that trust, um, on the b- on behalf of the company and made that all work.

And when you, when you're looking to, to hire these type of people, um, what, what, what are kind of core, uh, traits you look for, like, in someone?

So the really early hires, they needed to be, you know, bold, uh, have a tolerance for risk, right? We were lucky enough, you know, from my time at SAS Institute that I got to hire and manage and work with a lot of really accomplished data scientists, so that we already knew what a good one looked like.

Um, but, you know, the, the career journeys of those early hires that we were looking for is who's, who's had success in multiple different environments, a large bank, um, a tech company, a startup.