Customers care about who they work with. We won deals because customers liked our people better.
Interview: 6 factual areas of skill, score 1-5.
Prefer candidates that have done a similar job maybe at a slightly larger firm. Don’t go for high potential.
Value Creation vs. Value Protection
Before hiring an executive, decide what kind of role this is.
In early startups, most leadership roles need to create value. You want people who can figure things out, take intelligent risks, recruit great people, and build the next version of the company.
Later, some roles become more about protecting value. You may need operating discipline, controls, process, and domain experience because the company now has something meaningful to lose.
Do not accidentally hire a value protection executive into a value creation role. They may optimize the current business when the company needs to discover the next one.
Technical Athletes
For senior hires, the best candidate is often not the person with the longest tenure in your exact market. Too much old-industry experience can bring old assumptions.
Look for:
- First-principles thinking
- Learning velocity
- Judgment under ambiguity
- Ability to recruit above the company’s current level
- Ability to synthesize many inputs
- Courage to make tradeoffs
- Enough domain understanding to ask good questions
For a startup, a great team builder who can learn the domain may beat a domain veteran who cannot build the next team.
Define The Candidate With Examples
Generic specs are usually not enough. Before starting a search, collect a dozen real profiles and annotate them.
For each profile, mark:
- What is attractive?
- What is missing?
- Which tradeoffs would you accept?
- Which backgrounds are misleading?
- Which evidence would make you excited?
This creates a much better search brief than a list of abstract traits.
Executive Hiring
For executive roles, assess whether the candidate can:
- Build the team you need two years from now
- Recruit people stronger than themselves
- Raise the company’s ambition
- Communicate a compelling vision
- Make hard prioritization calls
- Change their mind with new information
- Operate with incomplete data
- Partner with founders without needing excessive structure
For CEO or founder-adjacent roles, fundraising and evangelism matter. They need to sell candidates, customers, partners, investors, and the internal team.
Interview Questions
See Interview Questions for a long list.
Reference Checks
See Reference Checks.
Bezos on hiring:
- Will you admire this person?
- Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?
- Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
The best employees are often a little different: A little eccentric, sometimes irreverent, even delighted to be unusual. They seem slightly odd, but in a really good way. Unusual personalities shake things up, make work more fun, and transform a plain-vanilla group into a team with flair and flavor.
Convincing people to join your startup vs a big company
“We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.” – (Stephen Cohen)