Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

The key to any great company is the people.

But if you don't put some real thought into hiring,

if you don't develop a philosophy early around how you are going to compensate your employees,

you're going to be in a world of hurt later, says Shannon Schultz, who heads up A16Z's people practice.

You don't build a product without having a product roadmap, right?

And so if you're going to build a company, you've got to have a roadmap on how you're going to attract the best talent and how you're going to retain the best talent.

Compensation from salary to different forms of, is the topic of this segment of the

A16Z podcast.

For the founders of many fast-growing companies, it's a bit of an afterthought, says the other

expert on the pod, Tan Nguyen.

When you're at this kind of high-velocity hiring rate, I think people forget about what's my strategy

and what direction am I pointing at because they're solving for very short-term needs of that

initial recruitment process. And that candidate saying, well, I've got so-and-so willing to

pay me X, Y, Z.

And you're in that trench.

You're trying to fight to win that.

And then you look down the road, you're 100 people, 80 people, and you really don't have a core essence of how you've paid your people.

Today we are talking about compensation.

And to help us do that, we have Shannon Schultz,

who heads up our people practices here at the firm.

Shannon, welcome.

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