"The more senior the hiring is, the more devastating a failure would be."
Omer Glass is CEO and co-founder of GrowthSpace, the world’s first outcome-focused talent development platform. Omer’s passion for upskilling began with his first startup, Careerologia, an online school for career development.
Following this, he became a management consultant at Shaldor, Israel’s leading management consulting firm, where he focused on business strategy.
A graduate of Seth Godin’s altMBA, an intensive workshop for people who want to make a difference in the world, Omer also holds a master’s degree in behavioral economics and a bachelor’s degree in economics and psychology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company
Omer Glass: My name is Omer Glass, the co-founder and CEO of Growthspace. We are on a mission to change how companies develop their talents, using AI, deep taxonomy, and data models, we are making coaching, mentoring, workshops, and training more accurate and impactful for employees and organizations.
On the personal side, I am a new father of a 3-month-old baby, a passionate backpacker, and a yoga & vipassana meditation practitioner.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Omer Glass: “There is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company than training” Ben Horwitz.
That’s why every company in the world spends a lot of money on talent development, especially “human-to-human” talent development, where people help other people to drive their performance. That includes coaching, mentoring, team coaching, workshops, and training for multiple functions in multiple geographies.
The problem is that companies usually fail in actually driving performance with training (or even measuring it). It is a very complicated task to find the right expert for each case, onboard them, run the program, and measure its impact on the individual/organization’s KPIs.
Growthspace developed a technology that does that at scale, leveraging over 2000 experts from 56 countries to enable companies to launch various talent development programs in one place (from management or sales training to high potential coaching), and measure their impact on business performance.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Omer Glass: The most important thing you could do as a startup founder is to find good executives & investors who will share the journey with you since the cost of mistakes can destroy the company.
That’s why you should do very thorough due diligence on every investor or executive you consider working with. Do your homework, and call multiple CEOs who worked with them (especially those who they didn’t give as references).
Next quarter, we will be focused on preparing our organization for its next level of growth and refining our organizational strategy and product vision.
Here is a two-fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Omer Glass: I really like Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow” and its sequel “Free Prize Inside” in which the author talks and lays down a framework for how to build remarkable products.
It’s called “Edgecrafting” and basically says that if you want to build something remarkable, you need to go around the edges. Understand the main elements of your business and ask yourself how can you go to the extreme with each edge. Think of Amazon, making online shopping the fastest and easiest, or Zoom making online conferencing a seamless experience.
The book I have gifted the most is “No Rules Rules” by Reed Hastings. I am very big on culture, and Netflix built a very inspiring one. Reed talks about its key elements in the book, and I took a lot of inspiration from it when we designed Growthspace culture.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Omer Glass: In times of economic downturn, when companies think twice about every expense they make, everything becomes harder. It means that in order to succeed (or even survive) you need to be smarter, innovative, and move fast.
You can’t do what you did and expect to succeed if it’s not working. You need to be able to look at your data, analyze it, come up with suggestions, and implement it fast.
This is true not just in the executive management level, but in all levels. The real challenge right now is building the processes and support systems that will encourage more parts of the business to be able to do that.
Growthspace helps a lot of its customers to cope with this challenge by matching coaches & mentors with their mid-level managers for development sprints focused on that.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Omer Glass: Hiring. People drive business success, so a critical part of a company’s success is its ability to hire the right people. The more senior the hiring is, the more devastating a failure would be.
For example, if you hire the wrong head of product, and part ways after a year (since you need to onboard them, and it will take time to see the data and understand that it’s not the right fit), you will find that you had no progress in your product this year, and now you need to find and onboard a new one, which will take an additional 6 months.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Omer Glass: Connecting to my previous answer, I would like to be able to read the minds of the 2 previous bosses of each new hire and understand how well they did.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Omer Glass for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Omer Glass or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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