EP53 - Ways of Working. With Nicola Sebastianelli, Co-founder & CTO (Zefi)
On other platforms: Web, Apple Podcast, YouTube.
The episode is in Italian, below my summary of the chat.
In this episode I talk with Nicola Sebastianelli, Co-founder and CTO of Zefi. Nicola has a very interesting background: after a double-degree in Computer Science in Bologna and Nice he started his career in Ferrari, then joined Renault in London, and after that back to Italy to join Gucci. A lot of corporate experience that shaped Nicola view on the ways of working: product thinking, agile and lean approach, flat organizational design. Since Nicola doesn't like to stay too much in the comfort zone, he decided to found a new company called Zefi along 4 other people (a lot of co-founders, right?). This young startup analyze data from customers, focusing on voice interactions, to extract meaningful insights using AI.
One key aspects Nicola highlights is the importance of validation and the "throwaway culture". Before starting to build for real, you should always do customer discovery and try to validate your idea. Build fast, keep it simple, and be ready to rebuild from scratch when it is the right moment:
"The moment we understood someone was willing to pay for our product, from that moment on we started to build for long-term, set some processes, get the first hires, and create a structure that will allow the builders to build the product."
Talking about hires, one of the first mistakes according to Nicola was to focus too much on technical skills and not enough on behavioral ones or culture fit. One interesting point here is that the best hires came overwhelmingly from referrals. That's how they found highly committed people that gained trust from day one.
Talking about ways of working, Zefi is a very lean and agile startup: 1 week sprints to foster speed and adaptability, lean-thinking and full ownership from end-to-end from engineers, weekly backlog grooming and monthly roadmap review. What surprised me is the direct line with customers:
"One of the things we wanted was for the feedback and requests side to be on a very tight loop. So the feedback loop had to be almost immediate. What we did was create direct channels with our clients right from the start. Literally a shared Slack channel."
Not something that will scale, but I think a very effective way for a startup to gain trust from their customers.
Since Zefi is a remote company, Nicola highlights the importance of communication. Better to over-communicate and go straight to the point:
"What we try to do is be extremely — I mean, we're pretty obsessed with this — extremely clear and precise in our communications, and to write as much as possible on public channels. In Slack, so that whenever context is needed on any kind of topic — say, sales-related topics that an engineer might not care that much about — they can still go back and retrieve that context very quickly."
AI is definitely changing the way we are working, and Nicola shares what he thinks will be the most crucial skills: being able to clearly articulate an idea and plan for execution. We will act as sort of "manager of agents", so better to be able to explain them what we want in a very clear way, right?
To conclude, a couple of personal lessons from Nicola. First, anyone that brings energy is a force multiplier that will boost team motivation. So be energetic and positive and the team will follow. Second, it is fundamental to be very direct in communication and even over-communicate expectations and intents. This will speed up problem resolutions and, once embraced, will be part of the culture of the company.
That's it, see you at the next episode!