Alan Mamedi is the CEO and co-founder of Truecaller. Truecaller is one of the leading mobile communication applications in the world with services in caller ID, spam detection, dialer functionalities and payment.
Mamedi holds a BSc in computer science from The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. Prior to Truecaller, Mamedi co-founded the largest search engine for home interior and employee reviews in Sweden, Möbeljakt.se and Jobbigt.se - and served as Chief Architect at Birdstep Technology.
Tell me about your early years.
My co-founder and I started Truecaller back in 2009. At that time, we raised our first angel investment into the company and decided to go working on the weekends to working full time, which was a big step for us. We were just twenty-five and had resigned from our jobs.
What has been your biggest challenge?
One of the biggest challenges has always been deciding how to scale up the organization. How do you find and retain great talent and when the company grows? How do you make sure that you keep producing and retain the efficiency with ten people, as fifty people don’t necessarily mean that you are five times faster? So, there are always challenging dimensions, but you can definitely scale those.
What are some important leadership lessons you’ve learned over the years?
I’ve learned how to be respectful. We’re living and working in a very hectic environment. Things move really fast, which means that when people get stressed, they can become frustrated and they can become extremely emotional in expressing things, which sometimes can be borderline. So staying calm as a leader is extremely important. Trying to support people and understanding where the frustration is coming from is important to be able to inspire them. Always be respectful to everyone and at the same time set expectations of how you expect other people to behave towards you.
What is your best interview question?
I often ask people question like: “If you would leave your company, who would miss you most, your team or your boss?” And there is no good answer to that one, but it gives a good sense of who is this person, do they care about their team or do they care only about their boss. It’s a middle ground.
How do you fire someone?
It’s important to give people a second chance and tell them beforehand, at least three months ahead, before dismissing them. Tell them that you are not performing, but I really want to see you shine in this role and I can help you to get there. Along with it, inform that if we can’t get to the expected level, we would have to part in separate ways. I think everyone deserves the honesty and I believe that it’s a fair way of firing people or giving people a second chance to show off.
How to build a great company culture?
It’s important to define what is important to you as a founder or as a founding team. What are the values that drive you; what made you take the decision to build a company and what did not inspire you from other companies. I think it’s extremely important that it’s driven by the founders. The founders should define the values, which drive them really strong. Pick five or six people in the organization whom you know are great in their performance, get them on board and make sure that they can replicate it across the organization.
How do you put workplace diversity into action?
I think it needs to be part of your culture that you embrace diversity. Diversity can mean so much to everything, from having an engineering organization in our case with both female and male, but it can also mean finding people from different parts of the world or utilizing people with certain disabilities. Diversity is something that we embrace a lot in our organization, because as a second-generation immigrant, I know it’s hard to sustain in a new country. I know that is always hard to get the first chance to exhibit your talents. We want to make sure that we always give people a chance to show that they are really good. What I’ve seen the past eight years is that when you do that, people appreciate it so much that they would walk through fire for you.
What advice would you give a first-time entrepreneur?
Never give up. I think it’s extremely important to hold on. I’ve seen far too many companies with great products or great ideas fail, because, in my opinion, they gave up too early. For example, you can start the best cleaning firm in the world just by wanting to build the best cleaning firm in the world. As long as you have a strong commitment and the ability to hold on in tough times without giving up, I believe you will succeed. It’s called the law of attraction and it really works.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
This post is part of “CEO Talk” series, which features leaders around the world speaking about their journeys. What does it take to become a successful entrepreneur or CEO? What is the path to success? What challenges did people face and how did they overcome them? Lan Anh and her guests answer all these questions and much more. To view the entire series, visit here.