Frequent, personal interaction is the key to good leadership, says MeetMe CTO Richard Friedman
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): You have worked as a tech executive in several very large organizations. Now you're in the smaller and perhaps faster moving world of a social media start-up. How are the two different?
Friedman: I am fortunate to have joined a few start-ups with amazing teams that were eventually acquired by larger companies. I don’t think your leadership style changes from small to medium to large, though the varying resources and goals of the company affect operational and strategic decisions. In all environments, you build towards a passionate team, committed to building products with members who respect each other. The basics of the process, communication and, in our field, technical knowledge, carry across these environments.
(TEP): How do you communicate with and lead your team at MeetMe, and how does that differ from how you communicated at the larger companies?
Friedman: Working with individuals and small teams, communication is not very different among companies of varying size. Personal communication and frequent team communication is valuable. As most of the folks I work with can attest, I don’t spend a lot of time at a desk. I am usually hands-on with different teams understanding what they are working on, learning what is going right and wrong. At larger companies I did much of the same, traveling between remote offices to be with and understand each of the teams.
In smaller companies, you also have the ability to communicate in a personal manner. For example, at MeetMe, we have a company lunch every two weeks where we cover product updates and upcoming releases. Every month we hold an engineering meeting reviewing every project in detail. I always worry that I am boring the team at this meeting, but I have heard too many times people at other companies say, “I don’t know what anyone is working on.” This feeling disconnects folks from the mission.
Things do change at the level of mass communication and scale. At MeetMe, we have an offsite developer event once a year, which allows us to get our team together, share internal knowledge and learn new things. At one of the larger companies where I worked, we had a conference attracting thousands of people from around the world, including employees, customers and partners. The scale of a large company equips it to offer a greater reach of knowledge and collaboration than that of which a smaller company can provide.
(TEP): MeetMe has been through a big rebranding. How does that affect your role? What challenges does it create?
Friedman: The lineage goes as follows: myYearbook was acquired by QuePasa, we rebranded the myYearbook platform as MeetMe, launched MeetMe in Spanish and Portuguese, migrated the QuePasa user base to the MeetMe web and mobile platforms, and launched MeetMe in another 10 languages. Going international and maintaining those languages has been a challenge, but it has also made us stronger in the delivery process. It was amazing to see what the team could accomplish. To know that we can go from a single-language platform to a multi-language platform with our internationalization partners has given us further confidence in our ability to deliver global products.
(TEP): Any advice you'd pass along to other CTO/CIOs?
Friedman: No matter the size of the company or your team, it is your actions that represent your leadership style. It is how you treat others that people will remember and respect. After one of the acquisitions, I bumped into the CEO of the acquiring company in a stairwell. He had never met me before, so he introduced himself and asked what I was working on. His intent listening was very clear and represented his leadership style.
I remember Bob Bickel, senior vice president for development at Bluestone walking into a meeting and picking up a small piece of trash from the floor. He did this at every meeting and when asked about it, his comment was that those small tasks add up. In truth, they added up bigger than just his actions and eventually the organization had an inside term, WWBD (What would Bob do?). It was something people would ask themselves whenever a decision was made. This was true at small Bluestone and continued post-acquisition at big Hewlett-Packard.
Richard Friedman is CTO of social discovery app MeetMe, which has more than 90 million members.
