<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=429271514207517&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Skip to content

Resilience in cleantech and learning lessons from failure with Scott Kubly

on • 35 min. read

Overview

Cleantechers - 

My most recent guest on Scaling Clean has been an advisor to three Seattle-area companies, a policy lead for the e-mobility leader Lime, as well as an official in four municipal transportation departments. He's also the CEO of an innovative camper van sharing company, Cabana.

On a recent episode of This Week in Cleantech, I nominated Scott Kubly for “Cleantecher of the Week” because he courageously authored an open-kimono post on LinkedIn about Cabana’s ending. 

Here's the thing about cleantech: It's hard. We're disrupting powerful, mature, incumbent sectors, and it's not like the disrupted are passively waiting around for us to put them out of business. Oh, and add to that difficulty the normal challenges launching companies within new industrial sectors.  

Everyone is going to have failures. We're going to lose jobs, accounts and companies. I've learned that there are more lessons for improvement available from failures than wins. Scott continues to display that courage and openness by agreeing to be our Scaling Clean guest. He's the first to talk with us about lessons learned from a significant, recent loss. I'm grateful he's done that. 

Here are Scott’s B3P’s:

25:25 - Recognize the value of time. Cut off less impactful endeavors (even if you love them) to focus on what matters for demand. Channel your time toward company growth.

29:06 - To be a successful CEO, it’s crucial to make mistakes and apologize without requiring forgiveness from others – but forgive yourself. In the leadership world, errors are inevitable. The key lies in transforming those missteps into valuable learning experiences.

48:55 - The Stockdale Paradox, named after Admiral James Stockdale, is a mindset that involves short-term realism and long-term optimism — a mindset that is often necessary to handle the challenges of owning a company. Even if you are struggling through your current reality, it’s crucial to maintain faith that you will be successful in the end.

 

Also listen on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, iHeart, and Google Podcasts.

Mike Casey:
All right. Hello, cleantechers, and welcome back to another episode of Scaling Clean. As listeners know, our show is tightly focused on interviewing CEOs to glean usable best practices and tips on how to build, run, and lead companies. My guest today is Scott Kubly. You might say that Scott ‘knows how to get around’. But what I really mean is that he's built a career on the expertise of how humans can more efficiently move around urban areas. He's been an advisor to three Seattle-area companies, a policy lead for the e-mobility leader Lime, as well as an official in four municipal transportation departments. But he's also the CEO of an innovative camper van-sharing company, Cabana. On a recent episode of ‘This Week in Cleantech’ I nominated Scott for ‘Cleantecher of the Week’ because he displayed a lot of courage in authoring an open kimono post on LinkedIn about Cabana ending. So here's the thing about cleantech. It's hard. We're disrupting powerful, mature, incumbent sectors. And it's not like the disrupted are sitting still waiting for us to put them out of business. So add to that the normal problems of launching new industrial sectors and companies. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to have failures.

We're gonna lose jobs, we're gonna lose accounts, and we'll lose companies. And I've learned myself that there's a lot more available to learn and to improve on from the failures and there are the wins. And Scott continues to display that courage and openness by agreeing to be our next guest on Scaling Clean. He's the first to talk with us about the lessons learned from a recent loss. And I'm grateful he's come on to pay for those lessons learned. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Kubly:
Thanks a lot, Mike. Great to be here.


Mike Casey:
I'll start with a few of our standard questions so listeners can get to know you. How would you summarize your background and career?

Scott Kubly’s Background and Early Life

Scott Kubly:
It's interesting. I think a reasonably atypical path to entrepreneurship. As you mentioned, I spent about two-thirds of my career in the public sector and then the last third at Lime and then Cabana. And so, I think that's reasonably unusual, but when I look back at kind of what the through line is from my whole career, I've always been entrepreneurial. I remember as a kid when I was growing up, my mom took us to Sam's Club at the time and we bought a bunch of Cola, a bunch of President's Choice Cola, or whatever the store brand Cola was. And we were living in an apartment complex and I sat by the soda machine and arbitraged Cola. So the soda machine was like 50 cents and I was selling it for 45. And just banking on kids wanting to save a nickel. And I had a deck painting business when I was a kid. 

Mike Casey:
Nice.

Reasons for Working in Government

Scott Kubly:
Then I went into the government and the reason I did was I wanted more city, right?  I grew up in the suburbs, but I wanted to grow up in the city. I wanted to live in the city and I wanted to help make more of them. And so I wound up getting into transportation and early on, I was working in a giant bureaucratic machine, the Washington Metro. I would hear over, I'd come in with these neat ideas because I was young and fresh-faced and I hear, we tried this and we tried that a while ago and it didn't work. And that was the de facto way to shut down a conversation. So that was the first four years of my career. And I felt very much like a fish out of water, but I didn't realize I was a fish out of water. And then I went to work for Mayor Fenty in DC and then kind of got hooked on working for mayors.

And the through line and I think the pattern is that if you think about what a mayor's office is, it's like a startup. So you get it, you get a mayor, he's somebody running for office, right? And they have a bunch of young people that are working on the campaign. They have more energy than expertise and they get elected. And that is like your first funding round, right? And then you have four years of runway, right?

Mike Casey:
I love that.

Scott Kubly:
In which you have to demonstrate product-market fit to the voters so that they'll put you in office again. And then what you do is you have a bunch of young people or mostly young people that wind up working in your mayor's office. You give them way more authority than they've ever had anywhere else or they could get anywhere else. Because they're bought into the product. And then they bump up against the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is telling them what you're trying to do is crazy. There's no way that you can do that. We tried that before but it didn't work. And you're expected to make a change. And that is the pattern for working in a mayor's office. And so after that, I went to work for Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. And then I went to work for the mayor out here in Seattle, Ed Murray. And then when I was leaving the mayor's office, this is where we met in a prior life. I knew that I had kind of reached my terminal job in the public sector. I'd pretty much given everything that I had.

Maybe it was not the terminal job, but it was my terminal job. How about that? I wanted to move into the startup world. I knew that what I wasn't going to be good at was doing business development, government relations, or maybe I didn't want to. And what you want to do and what you're good at are sometimes misaligned or are frequently the same things - you want to do stuff you're good at.

Mike Casey:
Yeah.

Tenure with Lime

Scott Kubly:
So I wound up going to Lime because it was a subject area that I understood and cared about. It was an opportunity to get in at a super early-stage startup and learn how they all worked. And I was there for probably a year, a little over a year. I think on my first or second day on the job, we launched our first scooter market. And then, within the year, we were at 70,000 scooters globally. Every time our founder went out to grab a cigarette, I would scurry after him and spend 5-10 minutes, however long it took to smoke a cigarette, asking him, okay, how do you raise money? Why did we do this? Why did our competitor do this? And learning from him all the strategy around fundraising and scaling. 

And then when I left, I went to start Cabana, which for listeners, and this is like five minutes into what should have been a short summary, but we were basically kind of trying to build a mobile hospitality experience. Take everything that you find in a hotel room, put it in the back of a camper van, kind of inspired by van life, but much more hospitality-focused. The idea - be sure you can put your Cabana on the edge of a cliff in Southern Utah, but you can also pop up a 500-room hotel at Coachella or you could pop up a destination wedding where there's no actual lodging. And so it's really building a hospitality product that allowed you to pull not just the price level but also the location level.

Important Mentor: Dan Tangherlini

Mike Casey:
Nice. Okay. Let's talk about mentors. Who were your one, two, or three most important mentors and what did you learn from them?

Scott Kubly:
Yeah, so I think the first one that I would point to early and I’m going sequentially in my career, was a guy named Dan Tangherlini. When I was first starting my career, Dan was the director of the district department of transportation. And then he came to the Washington Metro when I was there as the CEO or interim CEO. He went to work for Mayor Fenty. Now, fast forward, he was sitting in cabinet meetings with Obama, because he was Head of the GSA. There was a big scandal in Vegas, and he got tapped to take over the department after that. And now he's at the Emerson Collective. He is just an incredibly smart guy. 

In a lot of ways, early on he had the career that I wanted. A few things that I learned from him was, I think now later in life, it makes way more sense, he would have these little aphorisms and sayings and you would have to try to discern this meaning where it was almost an IQ test to figure out what he was saying, if you were picking up what he was putting down. 

So I was a budget analyst for him and he had the sign over the door to our big budget room where we would have the grillings of the departments. And he said, you believe in the infinite availability of finite resources, which is the ethos of what we were trying to impart in the Fenty administration. The other one was - if you want to innovate, remove a zero. And basically, scarcity leads to innovation. And then the other one, which I think has been even more relevant, and probably will come up a little bit later, kind of around people, which is it's way easier to prune than fertilize. It's way more fun. I'd much rather call and tell you to slow down than to call and tell you to start. 

Mike Casey:
Okay. I like that. Nice.

Important Mentor: Gabe Klein

Scott Kubly:
That kind of mindset that I learned from Dan. And then the other one is a guy named Gabe Klein, who is leading Biden's energy office. It's like this Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, Joint DOT and DOE thing, focusing on electrification of the vehicle network, sort of deploying chargers. And I think Gabe was the first person that I worked for that was really entrepreneurial. And he kind of lit a fire under me or unlocked something that was kind of long dormant. And he was kind of fearless. And he put me in charge of the Capital Bikeshare program in DC and then Divvy in Chicago.

He was constantly challenging the status quo and putting out big ideas. And I think, the other thing I learned from him was the fact that you have to have a big idea to like, and you have to say it out loud to get it to happen, to manifest it. The other thing that I learned from him, he grew up in Yogaville, which is a yoga retreat. And so I learned some metaphysics.

Mike Casey:
I have done a silent retreat at Yogaville.

Scott Kubly:
Okay, so yeah, so he grew up there, and he taught me this one thing that I have carried with me for the rest of my career, which is, that you have to be the same person on the inside that you are on the outside. It doesn't mean you have to be the exact same in every situation, but you can't pretend to be somebody you're not. Because it just gets too complicated to keep track of who you're trying to be.

Mike Casey:
Amen. Love that!

Scott Kubly:
Okay.

The End of Cabana

Mike Casey:
Awesome! Scott, you wrote so courageously about the end of Cabana. Few do this and more should, I think. And I haven't seen this level of confident openness since David Crane wrote about getting fired from NRG. And I met David for the first time last year, and I told him how much that had inspired me to be bold. So you did as well. I just wanted to say that, but I wanted to know, what motivated you to do that?

Scott Kubly:
When I was doing it, I was not thinking it was a courageous thing to do. I appreciate that. I'm still not a hundred percent sure it was. 

Mike Casey:
We're gonna go with my interpretation, not yours.

Pragmatic Aspect and Leadership Aspect

Scott Kubly:
Yeah, we'll go with yours. I think it's a couple of things. One is like, I don't view it as a failure. We're a venture-backed startup, not every venture-backed startup succeeds, right? When I look at it, it was, I think, the best professional experience I've ever had, even with the outcome that we had. I learned more about myself and more about other people and more about kind of building something than I'd ever learned professionally in the past. That's just like the experience that I had.

Then why? I mean there's the pragmatic side and then kind of the leadership side. So the pragmatic side is I've got to find a job. And so I've got to figure out how to tell the story of what happened with Cabana and explain why I'm walking away from it to prospective employers or prospective investors. Maybe I'd love to start another company again. I left everything that I had on the field. So I probably need to go and work somewhere again and kind of recharge that particular type of battery. But so part of it is just really pragmatic. I gotta update my LinkedIn post and make it so that I surface and then because I'm doing that, I'm going to need to explain how it happened.

Mike Casey:
Right.

Scott Kubly:
And the reality is, that the jobs that I had in the past - I was a reasonably public person, a public figure in the Pacific Northwest and the Seattle area. And so there's a good chance it'd get tweeted out or get picked up by one of the local tech publications. So I wanted to have a little bit of control over that narrative about how it gets reported. One. 
Then two. I think it's also for the people that were members of the team, right? Helping them have a story that they can tell to future employers as well, right? So like, oh, you're at this company. What happened? Cause right now, when you wind down a company, which is a holy cow, that is totally an underbelly of American industry. That is like.

Mike Casey:
Got you!

Scott Kubly:
That was totally new to me and fascinating. And if you are ever looking to buy a company, develop relationships with the companies that are the firms that do this because there are serious deals to be had. Just as a sidebar. But if you go to Cabana right now, it's like a 404, right? Cause bills aren't getting paid. Google shuts down the website. So I wanted folks to have something that they could point to explain the story, right? 

And then the other thing is, and there was a younger guy that was working for me, the last employee that we kept on. He was like 24-25. And I don't know if he realizes right now, how much cachet that should carry with future employers. Like I was the last person that this company chose to let go, right? Because that's how versatile I am. Hopefully down the road, he'll realize that if he doesn't yet. But he was talking to me and he was, I could tell that, pretty depressed one day. Cause when you're going through a startup, there's no right answer in life. There are good answers and bad answers, but there's no like right answer. 

And I think that when you're doing a company like we were trying to do, you have execution errors. There are mistakes, there are things that, given the benefit of hindsight, you would have done differently, given more time to weigh the options you would have done differently. And so I think he was letting a few of these things where he felt like he had messed something up, something had eaten him up, right?

Mike Casey:
Yeah.

Scott Kubly:
And I had this conversation with them and it was, look, certainly, there are undoubtedly many execution errors we made along the way, but none of those, I think, were company-killing execution mistakes, right? Sometimes the forces are bigger than your tiny little company.

Now, if all those conditions had been right, would we have made it? I don't know. We had some execution errors that, given the benefit of hindsight, I would definitely make different. But I wanted to give him and people like him, kind of the ability to let it go, right? Because you have these people, they poured their heart and soul into building something, and then it ceases to exist. 

Mike Casey:
I love that. Give them a way to let it go. Boy, do I love that one? All right. Just to know you could have done what people do when they get fired. I'm looking for my next opportunity. I mean, everybody on LinkedIn goes, you got canned. No one actually believes that. It's the biggest piece of bovine excrement that gets handed out on LinkedIn here, like, no, you got canned and it's okay. 

Scott Kubly:
Yeah. It happens to the best of us.

Mike Casey:
So we're trying to pay forward lessons learned to other people in your shoes, because man, I mean, I can tell you from being a niche service provider, heavy wears the crown. It's kind of lonely doing this thing. So I found there's a growing community of people who run cleantech companies. And I don't think anybody feels like they've got it all wired down. So my question to you is, if you could boil down this experience you just came through starting then losing Cabana. Three biggest lessons you want to pay for to people like you, like me.

Three Biggest Lessons from Starting and Losing Cabana

Scott Kubly:
When I thought about how to answer this question. It's very easy. There's going to be somewhat tactical, but there's like a through line where I think there's a single theme. The first one was when we were building out our software, we did it in a really smart way early on. We’re white-labeled. So we've got white-label software so we didn't have to build our own so that we could figure out if is there a product market fit for this contactless check-in and check-out. 

So with Cabana you didn't have to do a walkthrough, right? You just walk up, unlock, you're on your way, all the how-to videos built into the app. So we wanted to test whether there was a product market fit for that. And there was. And then the other thing that we did that was a white label was we used one of the marketplaces, one of the RV rental marketplaces, which has a white label fleet management software. And so our fleet started growing and so we started using that. 

So then as we started building our own tech, we got focused on integrating with that marketplace’s fleet management app and their kind of booking system. We did that because we thought it was really important that we be able to surface on that marketplace. 

The reality is, in our mature markets where we had built a brand and our vans were driving around and people could see them like maybe 5 to 10% of our traffic was coming in through that platform, which felt like a lot. So we didn't want to turn it off, right? But it was not a well-supported one, it wasn't built to be integrated with other software packages. So there wasn't an API that was really well documented and easy to integrate with our system. 

So we spent just way too many engineering hours trying to integrate with this thing that was like 5 to 10% of our demand. In hindsight, just a huge opportunity cost that slowed down the next thing that we didn't do quickly enough, which is, we knew from our very first board meeting from, frankly, before I'd even incorporated my very first pitch deck. Crude, what are my thoughts, putting them on the back of a napkin kind of level of the pitch deck. I knew that we needed to be asset-light, and what I mean by that is we couldn't have the vans sitting on our balance sheet and we couldn't use equity to buy vans because it would be way too dilutive.

And so we had solved that in a few different ways, but long-term we knew that we needed to get a host kind of local owner-operators to own these vehicles. Because otherwise, every time you're doing fleet financing, you need to raise a certain amount of equity to get a certain amount of leverage. And so we knew we needed to get to this franchise-like model or this host model that we're doing.

And we made the pivot to that in February of 2023. It was way too late. I knew in mid-2019 when I was writing the pitch deck that was the way we needed to grow. I knew in 2021, the spring of 2021, when we raised our series A, it was hard. And the reason it was hard was because we hadn't rolled out this model yet.

And I wanted to dog food our product too much. And we had integrated with this. We spent too much time trying to integrate with this software or this kind of back office and booking engine from a third-party marketplace. And so we spent all of our time trying to make that easier for our operators. And we weren't comfortable bringing in those hosts until we had it in a little better shape. 

We just lost a ton of time on that. And we knew literally before we started the company that is the direction we needed to go. And so I got too precious in terms of that, like 5 to 10% of demand. We would have been way better off taking that same amount of time and doing an integration with a GDS so that we showed up on Kayak or Expedia. So it was just an opportunity cost there. Sorry, I'm going a little long. 

Mike Casey:
No problem, go ahead. Paraphrase that if you can, best you can take it out of the Cabana specifics and try to, if you can, genericize that lesson because I think there's something very important there.

Time is the Most Valuable Asset

Scott Kubly:
No, so what I would say is the scarcest thing that we had was time. Time to build our product, prove it out, and demonstrate the product market fit. So time was our most valuable asset. And we spent too much of our software engineering resources focused on things that were not moving the needle on the demand side enough. And they were preventing us from hitting the strategic milestone, the strategic goal of the company. Because we're so busy trying to polish this one side of our software stack. And it was just all about kind of opportunity costs. We could have done way more in a way more important part of the business if we had just been willing to say, okay, we learned what we needed to learn from this part of our journey. And now it's time to cut that off and move forward. Completely new.

Mike Casey:
So what I hear you saying is, if you had to do it over again, you would have been much more ruthless at prioritizing the critical thing as opposed to the thing you're in love with.

Challenges with Finding the Right Leader

Scott Kubly:
Not even that. I think I would have euthanized it. I would be willing not just to stop prioritizing it, just cut it off and stop working on it and make a change. Because we'd learned everything we needed to learn. And by holding onto it, it was like a barnacle on a ship. All it did was slow us down. And then I think the third one. And again, I think it is a similar through line. My co-founder quit four or five months in, and it was my technical co-founder which was made it really challenging, but I never found the right leader to take over that role. I tried a bunch of different flavors of ice cream and never found the right one. And it's also the fun part of the business.

And so I wound up spending way too much time, trying to figure out how to be the technical co-founder or be the technical leader instead of figuring out, putting all of my time and attention on finding that person. And then essentially in a big way, kind of ceding control to somebody that wasn't there at the founding, which I think is hard. And again that gets back to all of those things, the software, the pivot to the platform, the hardware, not finding the right person, it all boiled down to the opportunity cost of what we could have been doing. 

And I can boil down every strategic or tactical mistake that we had to not having the right person in the room at the right time to help make that decision. Not that we didn't have wonderful people, but there were a few areas where we were just missing that, it was just the wrong seat, wrong bus, or good person. But it all boiled down to just not having the right kind of expertise in the room. 

Comparing Kubly’s Early Management Style to Current Approaches

Mike Casey:
Okay, if we split screened footage of Scott Kubly when he first managed other people, and we split screened how you were managing people during this experience, what are the differences that we would see?

Scott Kubly:
Yeah. So hair, a lot more hair.

Mike Casey:
Okay.

Scott Kubly:
That hair that did exist would be less gray. No, I would say mostly I think what you would see is internal to me. So it would be an internal split screen. I think early on, this is gonna sound kind of paradoxical, but I think more confident in my own abilities, but like much more humble about how limited they are, if that makes sense. So if you're familiar with imposter syndrome, there are people who are confident in their abilities, but they're not confident in their abilities. And so it's hard to explain, but I feel like I know the stuff that I'm good at now, and I don't feel insecure about being good at those things, but I'm also more aware of what I'm not good at. And I don't beat myself up for that because it's just like who I am. So that would be one. 

Mike Casey:
If I can, how did that greater awareness manifest in your interactions with people you were managing at Cabana?

Scott Kubly:
I would say I enjoy people that challenge me more now.

Mike Casey:
Got it. OK.

Scott Kubly:
Who are willing to call me out and if it's in a group meeting, all the better, I mean, obviously respectfully. You want people to challenge you and it doesn't feel as threatening anymore. I think I'm more interested in watching other people grow. So I think this happens as you get older. So I'm just about to turn 50.

Mike Casey:
Yeah.

Scott Kubly:
And I think there was a point at which, I think you're in your 20s and 30s and you're getting by on potential. People will talk, this guy's got a lot of potential. And then you hit a certain age where they're, you kind of are who you are. 

Mike Casey:
No more potential for you, bucko.

Scott Kubly: 
I mean, to a degree, right? That is reality. I have a youthful exuberance about me, so hopefully I still have some potential, but, I think I've gotten much more interested in watching other people grow and realize what they're capable of. So that's one. And then I think I'm way much more willing now to make a change in personnel. I am much more empathetic and sympathetic when I do.

What is the Role of an Effective CEO

Mike Casey:
I got you. Makes great sense. Okay. You quit your job tomorrow. You become a lecturer at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington and your first lecture is called the role of the effective CEO. What's your main point or set of points to those students?

Scott Kubly:
Well, given Cabana did not succeed, effective maybe. Maybe those who can’t do, teach, right? Or can do and those who can't teach. I mean teachers are amazing. But a little joke. I think context is everything, if you’re the CEO of a seed-stage startup, that's a really different kind of mindset than being the CEO of a publicly traded company or even a large company, doesn't have to be publicly traded. So I think any size that you're at, you’ve got to set the vision and you've got to create the values. 

I had a friend who told me something when I was starting Cabana. You start a company and you wanna ask people, how do I incorporate? How do I do all the tactical things? And that's not the important stuff. Tactics are like a Google search away. But his feedback to me was the thing that you need to recognize when you're the founder is that all of your good traits will be magnified and all of your bad traits will be magnified. It will be the culture of the organization for good and for ill. And so I think that's one thing - being thoughtful about the values that you have. 

And then I think the other thing is, it's such a cliche, your number one job is to hire great people. But it's a cliche for a reason because as mentioned, every mistake, every do-over I have, would have been like, I can point to - we didn't have the right people in the room helping us make decisions. And then it is context-dependent - to deliver resources. So set the vision, create the values, and build a team. You've got to make sure people have the resources to do what you're asking them to do. 

And then you got to reward the positive, prune the negative. If you're in a small company, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and get in there and do the work. So you're a CEO part-time and like a doer part-time. Whereas when I was running the Seattle DOT, I got to get out in the field and meet people and I want to make sure that I have relationships at every level of the organization and then also externally. So I can have a very wide field of vision versus just focusing on my direct reports. 

And then I think the other thing, maybe I should spend some time in Yogaville. I think when you're the CEO and I think you alluded to this, it's lonely and you're not normal. You're not a normal person if you've chosen to do it. And I think ambition is a mental health issue that our society has chosen to positively reward. It's not normal, it's not healthy. There are happier people out there. 

So, you're gonna be leading this group of people. And you're going to be making decisions that a lot of people on your team may or may not agree with, and they're not going to see the full field that you see. And they're not going to be facing the same trade-offs that you're facing. And so it can get pretty lonely. And I think this goes back to your split-screen question, which was earlier in my career I needed people to understand why I made the decision. And given the same information they would make the same decision. I really needed that and I needed them to see me for who I was and see my intent. And then as I've gotten older obviously you want that, you strive for it. But I think what I would always do is you can't make people like you. As much as you might want to, you can't. And a lot of times being the CEO means that people may respect you, they may follow you, but there's a dynamic that's always gonna be there.

I think this also works in a marriage as well. So you learn to focus on what my intent is. What is my intent? If I have good intent in what I'm doing, I can't control how people are gonna react to that. All I can do, I can do my best to communicate what we're doing, why we're doing it, and my intent in doing it, but ultimately I can't control how people respond to that.

And they're coming at it with a whole bunch of other stuff that's going on in their personal life or past or whatever that's influencing how they interpret it. And then the other is when you make a mistake, everybody makes them, CEOs make them, learning to apologize without requiring forgiveness. If that makes sense 

Mike Casey:
Very well said.

Scott Kubly:
And learning to forgive yourself. Because you're going to get some things wrong and you've just got to be able to miss that one. It's a different way of thinking about it, it's like a shooter's mindset. How do you get out of a slump? You just shoot your way out. If you're a basketball player, you've got to have a shooter's mindset. And I think that’s a thing that you need to develop, otherwise the misses grind on you.

Important Lessons Learned About Making Hires

Mike Casey:
Broadly speaking, hiring is always cited in these interviews as one of the most challenging parts of leading companies. What have you learned about making hires that you want to pass on to others?

Scott Kubly:
I think getting hired, and doing the hiring process people spend a lot of time focusing on getting chosen and not asking whether they want the job. And so a lot of times you might hire somebody that presents really well, cause they are trying to win the job selection process.

Scott Kubly:
And then they get chosen and they're, well, wait a second, I don't really want this. I just wanted to be chosen. So that's one kind of meta thing. Go to Amazon, they have 150 questions that they ask everybody, that they pick from. They have a phenomenal question bank. So just go to that. It's all tied to their leadership principles. It's like, it should be an outsourced HR service that they offer to other people. 

Mike Casey:
Well, because Jeff Bezos needs more money. I just don't think he's got enough right now.

Scott Kubly:
Exactly. So the other observation is you can teach people skills, but you can't change their character, their traits. We're focusing on personal growth, but they're much more immutable. And so hire for the trait and the character, not the skill. I mean, obviously, if you're hiring a doctor, you want to have a doctor that's got skills. So don't lean all the way into that statement. 


But life isn't a cafeteria. And so nobody's gonna come in with every trait that you want them. You can't pick, I want this appetizer and this entree and this dessert. You buy the whole meal and no substitutions. And so really knowing what is most critical and being honest with yourself when you're looking at the candidate, recognizing that they're going to be coming in with their own blind spots and not expecting them to be this perfect person, the next hire is the perfect hire. 

So I don't know. That's the high level. And I probably over-indexed to persistence and grit and self-awareness. The CTO that I hired was amazing to work with. And he came in and he was like, when you guys get to 100 people, I'm quitting because I hate working for big companies. I love working for small companies. I wanna do coding. I like leading people, but I still wanna code. And I was like, you're my guy because you know exactly what you want and you know exactly what you're good at and you are willing to leave when the time is right. That is very important to me.

Guidance on Letting Employees Go

Mike Casey:
Make sense. What's the guidance you'd offer in firing people?

Scott Kubly:
I've never heard somebody say they fired somebody too soon. If you feel you have somebody who's not performing, time isn't usually going to make it better. I have very rarely seen somebody that you're ready to fire and they turn it around. That's kind of one thing. I think that there's a tendency to come up with reasons not to because it's an incredibly hard conversation to have. And there’re always reasons like, well, we have this deliverable due, this project due, this other thing due. Not always, but the vast majority of the time what I have found is that when you wind up letting somebody go, even if they have a time-sensitive deadline, you wind up speeding up or figuring out how to hit it and you benefit by having fresh blood in there. 

I've had a few times where managers have come to me and said, well, I don't have to fire Nancy because she quit. And I think that's a failure. I think that is a failure of the manager. Because effectively there's a few things that you've done in that context. You have essentially made somebody's work environment so unpleasant that they've chosen the unknown over you. People don't just quit. You're forcing them out. And so you're being a bad man. One that is not great from human energy to put into the world standpoint. 

Two, you're accepting non-performance as a way to avoid a challenging conversation. And then three, the rest of your team sees it. Everybody sees that you're not holding some of these poor performer accountable. And so that's not good. Now as you mentioned people talk about getting fired, I've been fired, it happens. Sometimes you can be a wonderful human and it may not be the right place for you or the right job for you for whatever reason. 

And so I think there's a human side as well wherein a lot of ways. That harshness that I just delivered was really for the manager who needs to be making the hard conversation because fundamentally at some level, you need somebody who's making it harder for you to keep the poor performing or that person on that needs to go than it is for you to have the hard conversation. So there's a little bit of harshness that needs to come from the manager. Now for the person, I think a lot of times a gift, right? Because for the person that's on the receiving end, it's very rarely a surprise. They usually know that they're not doing super well. And it's usually not intrinsic about them as a person or their professional skills or abilities. It's usually just about the situation and the context. And so figuring out how to communicate that in a way that is humane and respectful and then figuring out how to help them find, knowing who they are, and what they're good at and trying to make it not about them, but about the situation.

And then the other thing is also the people that are staying. The people that aren't getting let go. So they wanna know if somebody is not performing, that person doesn't, that they're not gonna be just held on to. 

Mike Casey:
Got you.

Scott Kubly:
So high-performing people want to be around other high-performing people. And you want to demonstrate that. The flip side is everybody is also looking at whether you did it in a way that was humane or cruel. Because they're immediate. Everybody's also going to think about, well, if this ever happens to me, what is going to be like. Don't be afraid to do it.

I'm at a point now where I can tell you there's been a few people I can tell you literally in my first meeting where I'm, well, this isn't going to work. We hired the wrong person and it always takes me too long to get to that point, but it's about the person that's going, but it's just as much about the people that are staying. That's a very long-winded answer. I apologize for that.

Mike Casey:
Got it. That's all right. Two last questions. What did you learn to do either at work or in your personal life to maintain a high performance as the CEO? We have heard everything from I work on old cars to I go to the opera and everything in between. What did you do?

What Do You Do at Work or in Your Personal Life to Be a High-Performance CEO?

Scott Kubly:
Yeah. I don't think I did enough of those things. Candidly, I have a daughter. And so every moment of time that I don't have at work, it's trying to figure out how to be a parent. And so I guess that. But that just meant I don't go to the gym as much as I should, if at all. I don't eat as well as I'd like to, like none of those things. 

But I think that one thing where I do well is I try to be kind of contemplative and meditative, maybe it's like a long hike or whatever, but I try to have some mantras that I like to go back to to help me not let the things that are happening kind of get me down. So there are a few things. One is, and this is just a reality. People will frequently say, oh, you must be super stressed out. I have the least stressful job in the company because I am in complete control of my schedule and the decisions that are made. 

So I have control and most stress is about control. And it doesn't mean I get my way every time. It doesn't mean we do everything that I wanna do. What it means is I get to choose when I exert control or not, to a degree. If I need to have a meeting with somebody, I can put a meeting on their schedule. So I have a degree of control that nobody else in the organization has, and I have visibility into the most critical things that are happening. And control and uncertainty are huge creators of stress. 

And so in a lot of ways, the CEO is a less stressful job if you let it be. There's another. The other on the mantra side is - I try to maintain short-term realism and long-term optimism.

Mike Casey:
I love that. That's really good.

Scott Kubly:
I mean if you remember that book, Good to Great, I kind of cribbed it and modified it. But he writes about Admiral Stockdale, he calls it the Stockdale Paradox. And you go through and read the vignette, it's a page or two pages. It's all about that, just short-term realism, and long-term optimism.

When I was at Lime, one of our folks was like, when we raise a series C, everything will get better. Cause he was feeling a lot of pressure and I'm like, look, dude, when people give you more money, expectations go up, and pressure increases. We will have less pressure and things will be better when we no longer work here because that will mean we've had an exit. So short-term reality - it's only going to get harder, but long-term - it's gonna be good. 

So I think that's a very important kind of mindset to have. And then the other thing is - things are outside of your control, you can't ignore them. You need to be aware of them and game out how you respond to them, but you can't control them. So what is the worry about stressing about them?

Mike Casey:
Yeah, yeah.

Scott Kubly:
Worry about stress about what your reaction to that will be and how you're going to respond and recognize that. Life is nonstop curveballs. And so knowing that's coming it's like the Rumsfeld’s known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. And trying to minimize the unknown unknowns but recognize they're always going to be out there and just not sweating it and being aware that you're a resilient person that can adapt. It's not super pithy, but I think it allows a level of freedom from stress.

Mike Casey:
That makes sense. I’m going to take you way out, up in level to see if that short-term realism and long-term optimism apply. Last question. Has your work left you a climate optimist or a climate pessimist and why?

Scott Kubly:
That's a really good question. So I am a short-term realist. Both, so I am not super confident that in the public policy arena, we are going to do everything that we need to do and get hundreds of governments to all agree on the right policy parameters to fix climate change. 

What makes me an optimist? So that's my pessimistic short-term realism - politics are fickle, whatever. I think the optimism that I see is when we were trying to raise around last summer, I was talking to one of our investors about what the market looked like. It was brutal for companies. But we started talking about what was coming. And he was describing the number of young people now that are going into material science and battery science. And the number of people that are still in school or at the very start of their career that are focused on this topic area? If you'd asked me 5 to 10 years ago, I would have told you I thought public policy was the right way out. And I actually think that we will wind up. I have much more faith now in our ability to innovate our way.

Wrapping Up

Mike Casey:
From your mouth to God's ears, Scott Kubly. That's a good way to end this thing. You have been generous, thoughtful, wise, and I'm grateful. Scott, I wish you just all the luck in the world, and thanks for being able to take your time and share what you learned because that was a lot.

Scott Kubly:
Well, thank you very much. My pleasure.
Learn more >> Cleantech Inbound Marketing Services