Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jeremy Allaire, chairman and C.E.O. of Brightcove, an online video platform for Web sites, says the initial hires are key in building a business. In his case, he sought bright people “with whom I could have a high-bandwidth conversation.”

To read the complete interview and Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

*     *     *

How to Shape the DNA of a Young Company

Bryant: What were your most important leadership lessons?

Allaire: One of the most important influences early on was being educated in a Montessori setting. The Montessori ethos was very formative for me because it built into me a belief in self-direction, in independent thought, in peer collaboration, in responsibility.

Those even became tenets for me in terms of my management style — a kind of laissez-faire approach to allowing people to self-direct and peer-collaborate to figure things out and get things done here. That attracts a certain kind of person. There are other people who can’t thrive in that — they need things spelled out, they need their five tasks.

Another was that I took an interest in high school in extracurricular activities that were really about critical thought, analytical thought and leadership. I was on the debate team. I did model United Nations. So at a very young age I became very comfortable with speaking in a leadership capacity, conveying ideas, arguing for ideas and synthesizing information.

Bryant: What else?

Allaire: In college, I had a mentor, a professor at Macalester College in political science named Chuck Green, who taught me a lot about how things actually get done in the world. It wasn’t just, “Let’s read about politics or political theory.” It was about getting things done. How do people actually solve problems? How do people collaborate?

We also had to sponsor a project and run the project, in an entrepreneurial capacity. Several of us decided we were going to build something called native.net, which was basically a network using the Internet to enable communication and collaboration among Native American tribes that had been siloed in the past. We had to raise money, set it up and run it.

Bryant: What about your parents?

Allaire: Neither of my parents have really had anything to do with business. They’ve been social workers, they’ve run mental health institutions, they’ve run halfway houses, they’ve been writers. It’s true of both my parents, but I’ll call out my dad in particular on this — he would reinvent his career every four or five years, and it was a really powerful thing. It was just, “This is what I want to do and I’m going to do it.” He believed that if you have something you’re really passionate about, you can do it. That was always very inspiring to me.

Bryant: How do you hire?

Allaire: I’m one of those people who believe that there are certain phases of building an institution when you really shape the DNA of the company. I hired 10 people early on who worked for me directly, who were setting the foundation of the company. You have to get that right, because they’re going to be the people who hire the next 50 to 100 people. The die is cast, and now we’re approaching 300 people. For that foundation, I had a very clear idea of what the DNA needed to be.

Bryant: Can you elaborate?

Allaire: There are several core attributes that I really sought, and with each attribute there’s some fine-grain subtlety underneath it as well.

The first attribute: I put a huge premium on intelligence, so I wanted people who were extremely bright. It doesn’t mean they had a certain pedigree, but I was looking for bright people with whom I could have a high-bandwidth conversation, and who could synthesize really quickly and challenge my thinking.

The second was, I wanted this kind of interdisciplinary approach, and it relates to intelligence. How does this person think about the world as a whole? Are they able to think about multiple facets of things? Are they passionate about different dimensions of our business?

As an example, my head of engineering is just incredibly passionate about pricing strategy. I wanted people who have that quality. It wasn’t about, “Hey, what hobbies do you have?” It was much more about whether they could step out of their area of expertise.

Bryant: And how do you test for that?

Allaire: I’m in a unique position in that I have a view across every dimension of the business. And so you have conversations about different parts of the business and you see how quickly they can connect to it, parse it and ask good questions about it. If they ever say, “Yeah, I don’t really know much about that,” that’s a real problem.

Another attribute, which has been really important from a cultural perspective, is that I want people who are nice, who are genuinely good people, who have humility. If I had the opportunity to have someone who is the most brilliant person in the world but they were a prima donna, I wouldn’t want them. We’ve had a couple people like that and they just kind of get ejected from the organization. They can’t thrive, because they turn people off and they can’t operate in this kind of environment.

The last piece is sort of basic, but it relates to this concept of running a meritocracy. I just want people with a really relentless work ethic, and a pursuit of excellence. You have to get a sense for that from what they’ve done in the past — how have they pursued things, how passionate have they been about their work? I just want people who figure things out and will do whatever is necessary to get something done. I didn’t want to create a culture of burn the midnight oil, and sleep in cots. That was not the intention. It’s just a really, really great work ethic.

Bryant: How has the culture evolved as your company has grown? How do you maintain that original DNA, as you call it?

Allaire: It’s a huge challenge. One point is that you always need to have everyone feel like they’re on some broader mission. In the early stages, the mission is: Are we going to survive? Is there a product? Does it work? Is anyone going to want it? Is there a market? They’re like existential questions for a business, but I think those core mission tenets remain important through that growth stage. It’s something that people can attach themselves to, so people aren’t just coming into a job. So I’ve tried to really provide that narrative over and over, even as the milestones just keep changing.

The other thing is to hold onto that feeling of being a start-up, and it actually relates very deeply to how you go to the next phase of growth. Companies that figure out how to really become significant in scale reinvent themselves and create completely new things. Just as an example, a little over a year ago, we created a start-up inside the company to create new products. That was so galvanizing and so energizing, and it kind of cascaded across the company. People were saying, “This isn’t the kind of same old, same old — we’re reinventing ourselves.”

Bryant: Are there other things you do to maintain that start-up feel?

Allaire: There’s the core communications piece. In the last year, we grew to a size where I was feeling kind of out of touch with everybody, and that felt a little bit scary. We went from 180 people to almost 280 in less than a year, so that’s a lot of change.

I actually was inspired by one of the rituals the founders of Google established — every Friday they would invite anyone in the company on a worldwide basis to join a town hall to just talk about anything that’s happening in the company. So every Friday at 10 a.m., we tell people, you’ve got an hour and we’re going to talk about anything. Everything is on the table, and we’ll bring some topics, too. It is completely open book, we could talk about anything, and people can ask any hard question. Not everyone shows up, because people have a lot going on. But it just creates this sense for people that they’ve got access to anything that’s going on in the company strategically. It’s a really helpful thing.

*     *     *

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the Sunday Business section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. To contact him, please click here.