If you suck at hiring, almost nothing matters (early stage start-ups)

To succeed one has to be a) gifted b) work hard and c) get lucky. But it goes beyond being individually gifted and smart. Especially in the world of building successful companies. Because you the founder would or should almost do no work once your company has hit critical milestones. No work? What does that mean? It means that the only thing (well almost) a founder has to be really good at is hiring. Hiring and Empowering. Because there are finite number of hours in a day and fixed number of neurons in your head, you simply can’t grow without having right people doing bulk of the heavy lifting. Enough of the obvious here.

If you do a good job of hiring smarter, committed people, who are right for the stage of your company — you could get a chance on work on higher order problems like organizational building, expanding into more markets, building more products, opening more offices and such. If not, you would be spinning your wheels getting your foundation right. Hiring is the only thing that matters in your start-up’s success (well almost again). So how to hire well?

1. First: Know what excellence looks like in the area you are looking to hire. It means if you are a great technical co-founder do you know what a great-not-good sales leader looks like? If you are a B2C product founder, do you know what a great customer support person looks like? Well guess what, no one does until you do. What you could do though is find people and advisors who are experts in that field and have them contribute in the interview process. If not you will unwittingly hire B players. And they do just fine, limp your company along and are extremely hard to get rid of.
2. Second: Know the stage of your company. Are you still looking for product-market fit? Do you have your initial market figured out and initial sales flowing? Are you in a land grab and about to enter the tornado? You would need different traits in different stages. Multi-hat-wearing-commandos are best for pre or during product-market fit stage. Problem Solvers. When scaling your go-to-market infrastructure, strive to hire people who have done it before. Problem predictors. Define the phase of the company. Answer this question — How much does this phase require fresh learning vs pre-existing muscle memory?
3. Third: Hire leaders who can make decisions. Else you will have to. And you would suck at making many good decisions. And the debts from lazy decisions will hound you later. Bad leaders also lead to bad teams — which is really really bad. Leadership hires are the riskiest but create the most leverage when done well.
4. Fourth: Learn how to read people. Know what they want, who they are, and what they can become. Sure inspire your folks to become their best version, but don’t expect fundamental skill gaps to disappear just because the person is well intentioned. Good intentions are rarely sufficient. For e.g. a great CTO (exhibits great technical leadership) may not be a great VP of engineering (exhibits great people/task management) even though both roles seem very close. Very few people are willing and able to cross realms. Most people just stick to what they are good at. Find out what they are good at, help them get better at that and make sure that that aligns with your company’s goals in that phase.
5. Fifth: Don’t just hire people, build teams. And mobilize them towards your company goals of that phase. All work is done by teams. Your work starts at hiring and ends with launching teams that have high emotional quotient, camaraderie, fun and productivity. This is culture. Culture not cult. Evaluate culture-fit in this regard. Will the new hire hurt or elevate team’s productivity and norm structure?
6. Sixth: Don’t blindly adopt management book frameworks like Stars/Professional/Commitment. Hiring is more nuanced than that. And management books rarely study early growth start-ups. Hire for the success of the phase and hire for longevity of commitment and productivity. Don’t hire for perpetuity. Let people move on. And build playbooks along the way so you don’t lose that tribal knowledge when people move on. Hit milestones at any cost.
7. Seventh and final: Hire fast or hire slow? It depends! And you guessed it right. On the stage of your company. In the product-market fit stage? Hire Slow. As hell. Your foundations will bound the size of your future success. That’s why they say your first 10 hires matter the most. Facing land grab in the market and drowning in inbounds, hire as fast as you can. Hire functional leaders before that — so they can do the scaling for you. Set a rigorous recruiting process, training process and rules for when you’ll let people go. This phase won’t be pretty. But you would never win if you don’t step on the gas for hiring.

Hiring is a full time job. Think, Breathe, Do hiring. You are the Chief Hiring Officer. Now go make shit happen.