Interview with Gary Willmott – CEO, Hi5 [2023]

Hi5 was birthed out of a side-project to solve internal growth pains in the day-to-day running of a small company. Hi5 has now grown to become a solution that companies are paying for and using across the globe.

Hi5 is a simple, easy cloud solution that enables employees within companies to give each other ongoing feedback & recognition. We want to free up management and HR teams from laborious admin, so they can focus on qualitative staff engagement. 

You can measure appreciation, performance, engagement, and company culture with Hi5. We believe that Startups and Small Companies all over the world have the same challenge. 

Companies have software for email, sales, and even chatting, but there is no simple solution to help people manage people.

We believe Hi5 is that solution.

We made some key decisions since our inception in 2016. First, going independent and bootstrapped, then working remote-first. To do these two things, you need a core team of highly-skilled, dynamic people – and that’s what we’ve had since day one. In 2018, we took the leap and received Series A funding which helped push us over the 2-year hurdle.

We also invested a lot of time and resources into setting ourselves up as thought leaders in the HR space, which I believe has built a great presence for Hi5 (both online and offline).

However, one of our most valuable key ingredients has been our customers: we continually solicit feedback, take their input, and ship new features on a monthly basis to provide the most value we possibly can.

✅ Do: Look after your company culture – as a Founder or CEO, you’re the cornerstone of what the company believes in, and how it will look in the next 2 – 5 years and beyond. It’s also really important to over-communicate and play people to their strengths, while still providing enough opportunities for their growth.

❌ Don’t: Ask for CVs – they rarely provide real insights about the candidate. Rather ask them about their own projects, their failures, and ask them to do a practical test to show off their skills and give them a taste of what it will be like to work at your company. Also, don’t handhold people through their employment – people crave a challenge and the autonomy to figure problems out by themselves and try new things to see if they work.

Yeah, so we have an internal “living” document that we call the Playbook, which outlines all our daily routines and how we work in general. This works really well for our remote team, because it’s centrally accessible to all Hi5 co-workers and helps us stay aligned even when we need to work asynchronously.

The Hi5 Playbook gets updated all the time, that’s why I call it a “living” document, and this also reflects our culture of flexibility and autonomy. You can learn more about our Playbook and how we work here.

The work-life balance is a tricky one. I’ve tried many apps in the past and nothing really stuck with me. The most important thing I’ve learned is not to wake up and check email or Slack first thing in the morning.

I find that Slack and email are helpful tools, however, these tools allow other people to create tasks for you in a way, instead of you sitting down, planning and creating tasks for yourself.

The Market has definitely swung from a Demand to a Supply market. A salary and the old office perks aren’t enough to keep people around.

I’ve seen a massive shift when it comes to job satisfaction. People are much more motivated to work when there’s a great culture that relies on autonomy and allowance for failure as opposed to a massive salary with a clear-cut career path. However, there’s no right or wrong – it all depends on the company and its staff.

When hiring at Hi5, this was our focus from day 1: to ensure that people would know exactly why Hi5 wouldn’t be a culture fit before wasting each other’s time. By giving employees real responsibility without micro-managing them, it has allowed me to step outside of the day-to-day and have the privilege of watching the company grow without me.

Now at GoDaddy, it’s been incredible to see culture at scale with over 10k employees. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Aman Bhutani’s leadership and accessibility at such a scale.

I can’t stress this enough, keep talking to customers and do things that don’t scale. I highly recommend reading Paul Graham’s Blog Post.

It’s easier than ever to launch a product that’s cost-effective and scalable. There are so many incredible No Code tools out there, so it’s not necessary to have expensive tech stacks anymore (just a great idea, good people, and a lot of grit!).

The trick is not to overcomplicate the product with your own hypothesis – lean more on your customers and ship for them. Don’t launch features they don’t want just to try and prove your idea right.

Being realistic. I guess any entrepreneur is an entrepreneur because they dream and think about things that haven’t been done before. However, it’s tricky to balance your ball-park vision with being realistic about the goals and expectations you have for yourself and the company.

We have set some high-level goals for Hi5 in the next 5 years and have started a shared equity model to enable our employees to reap the benefits of their investments into Hi5. With that said, we’re obviously working towards building Hi5 into a highly profitable startup without compromising on the reason why we exist, which is to help companies all over the world to recognize employees and help them grow.

This vision has never changed. For instance, we’ve just unlocked Hi5 Games, a new product to help with onboarding remote employees through learning more about each other and the company culture in a fun and highly accessible way.