EP 125: Leadership and hiring in times of crisis: Strategies for success with Parker Barrile, Partner at Norwest Venture

One of the pieces of advice that I deeply believe in and have talked to my portfolio companies about is don't die.

Yeah, that's really obvious.

It's actually, it's great advice.

It's so simplistic, but it's like, like just copy it.

You got to survive to thrive type of thing,

right?

Yeah.

And because

the economy moves in cycles and we are going through a cycle of rising interest rates, compressing valuations, and understandably companies are not hiring as much as they were.

In fact, many companies are laying people off and reducing headcount.

but you're already starting to see that tip back toward growth.

I think I saw an announcement from Salesforce recently.

They've done layoffs early in the year, and now they've been very public about building back some of the teams.

And they're hiring into different business units, and they're hiring slightly different positions than the ones they laid off, but they're already back to building.

Because I think we're past the peak pessimism.

And if you don't die, which sounds very simplistic, then you're going to be around to grow back with the economy.

I saw that at LinkedIn back when I joined in 2009, a long time ago, but it was a pretty dark economic time.

And LinkedIn's growth slowed.

You can see it in the S1 filing, but then it reaccelerated as we were coming out of the 08-09 recession.