Lecture 11 — Hiring and Culture

Gagik Avakyan
Sep 1, 2018 · 1 min read

Speakers: John Collison, Patrick Collison — the founders of Stripe; Ben Silberman is the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest.

The main things which i can highlight:

You can’t be involved in every decision of your business.

The first ten hires is really hard, because you’re making these first ten hires at a point where no one’s heard of this company before. Nobody wants to work with you. You are these two weird people working on this weird idea.

You will never 100% know is this person is going to be really great until you work with him.

You should hire people who will care so much, that even a small detail is a great pain for them. If you are hiring someone outside of your discipline, talk with leaders in that field how to determine whether someone is ‘World Class’.

one of the benefits of working at a startup is you can be handed a challenge no one else in large company would be crazy enough to let you take on. This responsibility is exciting, but just because an employee may fail, doesn’t mean that the employee is a failure.

Creating an environment where employees are scared to experiment and fail, would be detrimental to a company’s growth.