Do your homework. Over time,
we’ve added more members to
the team and did some specific searches around bringing in
people who had the right
background. It meant finding
people who had the right cultural fit. Culture is a very
important part of what makes
a company successful.
We have a cultural part of
the interview process. We
bring some folks in — and
they can be fairly junior people in the organization — that
are trained to do cultural interviews to assess the fit aspect.
We’re looking for certain
dimensions and certain attributes that the interviewees will
have that are similar to what
we do here.
Being able to work as part of
a team and being bold and willing to take risks, these are the
things that we look for in individuals that make this a successful place over time. We ask
a variety of questions about
how people approach life in
general to try to get to how
they think about culture, and
it’s worked pretty effectively.
Make teamwork your priority. One
of the most important things is
being able to work as part of
the team to achieve a higher
goal. That’s one thing that I
hold very high just because it
makes us successful. If people
are thinking about how we as
a team can succeed, versus
how the individual can succeed, it makes a big difference
in terms of the outcomes.
Teamwork is incredibly
important. When I see people
working together to solve
problems, we can do a lot of
stuff. When people are working against each other, it prevents us from moving forward.
You can spend a lot of energy
internally not moving forward.
We’re in a business where
we’ve got some big competitors — Microsoft and Apple —
so we’ve got to be able to
react quickly. It requires a concerted effort, and we all need
to be going in the same direction with a clear vision and
clear teamwork.
Look for brain power. The other
thing that we look for in the
cultural interview is just a certain amount of pure smarts
and competence. We have to
be able to manage a fairly
complex ecosystem and to
make a market, much like
Microsoft did in the early days.
Being able to do that requires
some pretty smart people, and
so all of the management team
needs to get our business and
understand the complexities
of our business. Above and
beyond just generic management skills, it requires people
who are very smart.
Balance boldness with accountability. As a pioneer and as a
leader, we’re solving a problem that nobody else has
solved yet, and we’re trying to
create this interoperable
ecosystem of devices that
allow you to consume digital
media.
To do that, we’ve got to be
able to think creatively. We’ve
got to be able to think dynamically about the market, and
that requires a certain breed
of individual to be successful.
The company’s leaders
need to understand the complexities of the market we
operate in and how the market will respond to various
things that we’re doing. It
requires judgment and a deep
understanding of the market.
If a job candidate has those
things, then that person is
better able to take smart
risks ultimately so that they
pay off.
One thing we can do is take
a risk, but then, do we actually execute properly to give
the risk the best chance of
being successful? That’s been
a big emphasis for us as we’ve
continued to mature and get
larger as a company.
HOW TO REACH: DivX Inc., (858) 882-0600 or www.divx.com
