Yo, technology.

What is it all about?

When you're dealing with people, like if an environment is like massively unsafe psychologically,

the worst thing you can do is tell people to stick their necks out.

Because they're going to get their heads chopped off.

Yeah.

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and

inside the minds of the top people in tech. Thank you for tuning in. It is another glorious week

here in California, and to celebrate it, I spent hours and hours and hours in rush hour

traffic. And it's actually made me think of Mark Moore. We had him on, he's the guy from Uber

a few weeks ago when he was talking about flying cars. I want them now. There's a lot of time.

I will never get back. But I think you will find that my long hours going back and forth

across the Dumbarton Bridge were worth it. Because this week, on the program, we have Laslow

Bach, who for 10 years was the head of people operations at Google. So it was under his watch

that the search giant went from something

like 6,000 people to more than 60,000. So like a 10fold increase. And yet somehow the company

managed to keep its vibe of the happy, go lucky type place that people seem to really like and

want to stay. Being Google, of course, pulling that off was largely down to data.

Bach was really right at the heart of this whole movement of analyzing what makes people happy

to work or just happy generally, and then figuring out how to systematize that at the office.

Anyhow, Laslow left Google about three years ago and he kind of laid low for a while.

And then he popped up last year raising a boatload of money, something like $40 million to fund his new startup, which is called Humu.

...