Building A Great Core Team

"Once money is no longer your biggest problem, hiring is."

Very true. After moving to the investment side a little while ago, I've seen firsthand that when founders are not stressed out about fundraising, they're stressed out about hiring. If I was to categorize requests that our portfolio companies have made of us, the breakdown would be something like:

* 50% help with hiring

* 20% introduction requests

* 15% requests for product feedback

* 15% miscellaneous (technical reviews, sitting down and discussing long-term strategy, etc.)

I feel like these people took a lot of wrong lessons from this process, effectively interpreting lessons in terms of their own confirmation bias. Every single one of their three great engineers was hired based on establishing relationships with skilled folks, talking with them, and getting to know them as people. Lessons 2, 3, & 4? Not bad. Yet lesson 5? Grind their bones to dust with the most awful of modern hiring concepts - which was used for exactly 0 of their initial "top-tier code ninja rockstar" hires. They talk about it being haphazard, but the quote about evaluating people based on your "full-of-shit-meter" is almost spot on.

Why do we keep insisting that hiring not be based on people?

If people are motivated, quality, self-learning staff, they'll pick up whatever language, or API, or widget you throw at them. And if they're crap, they're crap. All four hours of tech. grilling is going to tell you is that you won't have to spend a couple weeks at slightly lower efficiency while they code using a language reference, or looking on StackExchange, rather than doing it from memory. What it won't reveal is that they're lazy, they just memorized a bunch of common tests, they can't actually think, or can't solve fuzzy problems you don't know you'll have. If you want hammers, then go buy a hammer, but if we want people, then we should stop beating our heads against walls, and go hire people.

Paraphrasing of one of my favourite West Wing quotes:

There was a man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town. And that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, "I’m religious. I pray. God will save me."

The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, "Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety." But the man shouted back, "God will save me."

A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, "Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety." But the man shouted back that he prayed, and that God will save him.

Well...the man drowned. And standing at the gates, he said "I’m religious, I pray, I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?"

The response? "I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?"

I would argue that hiring is not the biggest problem: people are. Hiring, firing, and management are all critical. Early on, finding people is about finding trust, motivation, and (to some extent) skills. Firing is about identifying that something isn't working out and ending it -- you cannot keep people around that hurt the company, they are a cancer and should be removed. Managing people is often forgotten and really important. Happy employees are better employees, they are motivated, care, and create a better work product.

With all that said, I like some of these messages. Always be recruiting and create a process are both really important. The latter of these does not mean to create bureaucracy, it just means to be deliberate about who you bring on.