How your problems – and hiring – need to evolve as you scale, according to Patty McCorc

The Netflix culture deck has been viewed over 17 million times and covered by the New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Sheryl Sandberg called it one of the most important documents to come out of Silicon Valley. Detractors called it brutal (which, Patty and Jessica reveal during our interview, was by design). Why did Netflix spend 10 years and thousands of hours creating this document? And what can founders learn about molding culture and building teams from the people behind it?

In this special episode of Spotlight On, recorded live at the Accel People Summit, Accel’s Pete Clarke speaks with hosts of the TruthWorks podcast: Patty McCord, author and former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, and Jessica Neal, former Chief HR Officer at Netflix and Venture Partner at TCV. Patty and Jessica share the real story behind the culture deck, why Netflix chose a radically different approach to compensation, and the mistakes that still keep them up at night.

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Season 3:
This season, we’re digging into the parts of founding and building companies that people don’t often see: the firsts, the messy moments, and the key decision points that come after that initial founding phase. Great companies are built one decision at a time, so we’re asking the people doing the building: How do you make the decisions that matter? What are the tradeoffs? And would you do it the same way again?

Spotlight On:
Spotlight On is a podcast about how companies are built, from the people doing the building.

Accel:
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Bumble, CrowdStrike, Fiverr, Flipkart, Freshworks, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Spotify, Squarespace, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses.

Featured: Patty McCord, author and former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix; Jessica Neal, former Chief HR Officer at Netflix and Venture Partner at TCV; and Accel's Pete Clarke

Conversation Highlights

5:38 – Great recruiters get obsessed with what people do
6:30 – How Netflix built their culture around behaviors rather than values
9:53 – How publishing the culture deck transformed recruitment at Netflix
11:58 – Practical advice for keeping your company values up-to-date
19:46 – You need to hire from big corporations as you scale—but first, “reprogram” those hires
22:53 – Is there a secret island where all the A players live?
25:25 – Evaluate managers on the metric of how many great people they hire
29:41 – Why Patty counseled Netflix to forego performance-based bonuses
34:30 – How to let people go with dignity—and take the shame out of saying goodbye
39:00 – The mistakes that still keep Patty and Jessica up at night
42:42 – Advice for treating DEI less like an HR initiative and more like a product


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Patty McCord and Jessica Neal | Behind the Netflix Culture Deck | S3E12 | Spotlight On | AccelVC
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