Talent, culture and creativity at a Silicon Valley scale-up

10-minute watch

As a Silicon Valley HR leader Ray Martinelli knows that talent is key to creating a great company and to scaling up. And to support that talent you need to engender trust through building an organisation of authenticity and accountability, he says.

With 20 plus years in global HR with high-growth companies in Silicon Valley, he has had plenty of time to find the secret sauce of talent attraction and retention. And while values and culture are foremost, he warns that those values and that culture must evolve.

“When you try and hold onto the culture too much I think sometimes you start retaining practices that may not be right for the company at a certain stage. Any new person we bring on board we believe is going to be additive and help us evolve and shift the culture a little bit,” he says.

In this video Martinelli shares his tips for hiring for success, the importance of creativity and work-life integration.

About Ray Martinelli 

Ray Martinelli brings more than 20 years of experience in global human resource management with industry-leading, high-growth companies in Silicon Valley. Before Coupa, he was the chief people officer at Alfresco Software where he was responsible for global human resources and worked closely with the executive team to scale the organization and expand its global presence. Prior to Alfresco, he was chief people officer at ServiceSource where he helped grow the company from 150 employees to more than 3,500 employees worldwide.

Throughout his career, he has held executive-level human resource positions at leading technology brands, including Macromedia where he served as senior vice president of human resources, as well as Juniper Networks. Ray earned a master's degree in organizational development from Golden Gate University and a bachelor's degree in organizational communications from Sacramento State University. 

Coupa’s Business Spend Management platform empowers businesses to spend smarter, simpler, and safer. With more than $2.3 trillion of transactional spend under management across its global customer base, Coupa offers businesses – from the Fortune 100 to the world’s fastest-growing organizations – the visibility and control needed to manage costs, mitigate risks, and scale for growth in one comprehensive and open platform in the cloud.

Transcript

Why talent sits at the heart of business growth

I've been fortunate enough to be part of the Silicon Valley and the different phases that we've all faced here. I've been over 20/25 years in the industry and certainly I'm very proud of how HR has evolved over the years to become very much more of a businesspartner aligned to the business.

And I think as the challenges grow in the industry it's become more apparent, if it wasn't before, that at the heart of all of that is talent. And I believe that the HR function can offer a lot to businesses to help not only bring in great talent, but also come up withplans and facilitate the retention of great talent and growth within the organization. So I've seen a real evolution here.

But for me I think there’s a couple of things that have become really critical over the years and I think it's just more reinforced it if you will. I believe absolutely that if you're going to create a great company and thrive it's all about the talent in the organization. It's about supporting that talent and you do that through trust, through building an organization of authenticity and building an organization of accountability.

How culture needs to evolve as organisations scale

And for me I've always believed that the culture of the company and the value system that's in place is important. But the thing that's changed for me a little bit is a lot of times people will say we want to keep the culture as it is. We don't want it to change. Ibelieve, and I know at Coupa we believe very strongly in this, is that we want the culture to evolve.

In fact we push for that. Any new person we bring on board we believe is going to be additive and help us evolve and shift the culture a little bit. As we grew internationally, it definitely changed. So we are very much excited about an evolution of the culture.

What we don't want to do is change the core value system that has made us special. And so we do a lot of work around our core values and really dig into those and what they mean. And those core values can take us to 5- 10- 15- 20,000 employees andbeyond. But what I've learned is you have to let go of some of the ways you do things and let the culture kind of evolve on itsown.

And when you try and hold onto the culture too much I think sometimes you start retaining practices that may not be right for the company at a certain stage. However, what you can't do is lose the essence of what's really important and really put a stake in theground of what those things are and make sure that those are the forefront.

And that's something for me – I become so passionate around it because I think it makes a huge difference in the growth ofa company.

The role of values in sustaining growth

We have three values that we talk about a lot. And within those values we dig deep and with examples. One is customer success, whether it be an external customer or internal customer it's not about satisfying customers. A lot of companies can do that. It's about helping and assisting companies to be successful. And what does that mean? It means having the right metrics in place, being the expert to help those companies evolve and holding ourselves and them accountable for that to be successful.

And that means sometimes challenging conversations but thoughtful conversations and that again could be with an externalcustomer or internal customer.

Our second value is focus on results. It's about putting results out there as the milestone in which you're trying to achieve and we try and minimize processes and group think and all those things that sometimes companies do to slow things down and really focus on what are we trying to accomplish and what is the best way to get there and what are the resources we need to get there?

So in every meeting, anytime you're in a meeting at Coupa or 95% of the time, you're going to hear what are you trying to achieve? What are the results and what is the best way that we can help you get there? We don't want to talk a lot about the processes and all the things in between because we expect people and employees are going to get there.

The last thing is strive for excellence. Keep on striving. We can always learn, we can always get better and admit that and be open to that. And if you make a mistake be accountable because we all are going to make mistakes and we learn from those mistakes and it's about striving to get better and constantly be trying to learn. And we put a lot of things in place to help employees with that. You know, we believe Coupa is a platform for personal professional growth and the spirit of being a learner is absolutely critical.

And as some of the underlying things underneath that again is authenticity, it's accountability, it's respect and it's clarity. I've been here almost six years and those have been guiding posts that we're very passionate about. And I think it's part of, it's a keycomponent to what's made us successful.

How Coupa hires for long-term success

We take hiring very seriously, not only for Coupa but also for the candidates that we're interviewing. We want to make sure that we're being very clear about the environment that they're coming into because our ultimate goal is for them to come here and besuccessful.

And if somebody comes on board and they're not clear about Coupa and who we are and how we work and they're a failure, that's a failure on our part. And that's not a good thing.

So we do have some methods and some ways that we go about this to make sure that we're being very clear on who we are as a company, what we will expect from people and we also talk to them a lot about their expectations and how they like to work.

And it's important to spend that time upfront ensuring that there is that fit. One of the things we talk a lot about is that certainly what is critical is you want to find somebody that has the functional expertise to do the job you're interviewing for, and that's a given, but what is even more important is to make sure that they're individuals that can thrive in the environment that we're in andhelp us evolve and be additive to that environment. So that's a critical thing. We do a lot of workshops around this to helpmanagers as they hire people and scale to assess that, for sure.

Why creativity and accountability go hand in hand

When we hire people, one of the things that we want to make sure of, regardless of the role that they're in and whether it be an entry level role or a more senior role in the organization, we want to hire people and we make a conscious effort to hire people thathave a creative mindset, entrepreneurial mindset. And when I say that what I mean is they're curious. They want to look at options and new and innovative ways of doing things. Whether it be somebody within the HR function in regard to compensation or the way we do benefits or the way we do hiring we know that we know the basic way to do it.

So what we're looking for is somebody that's going to come in with some new ideas and ways to look at it a little bit differently. And I think this is the same across the organization.

And I don't know if you can teach it, but what I think you can do is support it. And what I mean by that is allowing people theability to think out of the box.

In fact push that as part of the agenda is to, is in conversations with employees, say, this is the way we've done it. However, think of new ways. And we're okay with you making mistakes, we're okay with you fumbling a little bit over this, but we really want you to think out of the box and come up with ideas and you need to create a safe environment where people can do that.

So it's not so much a skill we train it's more of creating an environment that supports that. And we talk a lot about that in our management training courses. Allow people the flexibility to think out of the box and to bring you along, if you will, in new ways of doing things, because often what'll happen is, particularly as you get under stress and the company is growing really fast, people will bring up new ideas and sometimes the first reaction is that's just going to be time consuming to think through that. Our view is that time is well worth spent because you're going to get some kernels of data and information and new ways of doing things that are going to be phenomenal.

Rethinking work-life integration as organisations grow

At Coupa often when I interview employees they ask me about the culture and how we work and work life balance and I kinda chuckle a little bit because work-life balance is a hard thing to define.

But what we talk about at Coupa, and this been like this since I got here is really we believe in work-life integration. And what that means is we hold people accountable to get the work done. If they could do it in eight hours or five hours, it really depends on the outcome that they can achieve. And if during the day they have engagements or things that they need to do to round out their life and support their family we're not going to monitor that. We're open to that. So it's about integrating their lives, work-life, and making sure that the outcomes for everybody are positive. 

So we've always had that philosophy and I think that's going to become even more important for companies as we evolve over the next year or two. It's not about an eight to five sitting in the chair and clocking in anymore.