How to Do Company All-Hands Meetings Right with Guru Rick Nucci, Co-founder & CEO @ Guru

1. How to Run All Hands Meetings the Right Way

2. • AI search and answer gen for companies
• Founded in 2013 after Boomi acquired by Dell
• Recently had our 100th All Hands (Town Hall)
Rick Nucci
CEO
Mitch Stewart
CTO
Guru at a glance
Investors
Raised $70M, incl. $30M Series C round led by Accel in March 2020
Customers
3000+ organizations leveraging Guru

3. Why do Town Halls at all?
Alignment: Effective way to align everyone around company strategy, goals, challenges,
and vision
Culture: Chance to reinforce company culture by highlighting values and rituals, and
recognizing achievements
Transparency: Opportunity to directly communicate important information and highlight
feedback from the team in a public setting

4. What’s Guru’s Town Hall format?
Frequency: Monthly
Length: 90 minutes, recorded
Organization:
● Planning starts one/two weeks in advance
● VP of People Ops organizes in a private Slack channel (#team-townhall)
● The agenda is a mix of recurring and one-time segments
Speakers:
● CEO hosts
● Anyone can be a speaker (if the topic is right)
● Employees post live questions and comments in an open Slack channel (#townhall)

5. What does a typical agenda look like?
Recurring segments:
● Announcements: Share key dates for things like offsites, eNPS surveys, open enrollment
● New Hires & Promotions: Welcome new team members and celebrate those changing roles
● Values in Action: Highlight core values
● Voice of the Customer: Hear directly from customers
● Anonymous Questions: Answer questions submitted by employees
Sample one-time segments:
● Product roadmap: Take a close look at the new capabilities coming to Guru
● Launch lookback: Review results of a recent launch or announcement and share learnings
● New feature deep dive: Explain a major product update and what it means for customers
General approach: 40% remind/reinforce, 60% new content

6. 100 Town Halls.
7 Lessons.

7. 1. Set the mood

9. 2. Set the context

11. 3. Values in action

13. 4. Voice of the customer

15. 5. Avoid heavy financials

17. 6. Anonymous questions

19. 7. Don’t sugar coat it

20. Credit: Kim Scott

21. Q&A

22. 2.Create a level playing field