Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann)

In this lecture Ben Silbermann, the founder of Pinterest, and John and Patrick Collison, the founders of Stripe, talk about company culture and team building.

Ben Silbermann states that hiring, the meaning of daily job, communication
and celebration are the 4 core parts of their culture, while John Collison claims that the one thing they focus on to a high level is transparency internally because it helps employees work together productively.

Ben Silbermann says that it’s good to look for people that we want to work with, who are talented, creative, super curious, who work hard, have high integrity and low ego. He considers quirkiness to be an appealing factor because people excited about many disciplines tend to build great products and are great at collaborating. He also advises talking with leaders in the field about how to determine whether someone is ‘World Class’, if we are hiring someone outside of our discipline, because learning what’s good and bad during the interview process is an extremely expensive use of our time and everyone else’s time.

Patrick Collison states that when they were hiring their first ten people they looked for 3 traits: genuine things, caring a great deal, completing things. We should hire people who will care so much, that even a small detail is a great pain for them and who like getting things finished. The next advise Patrick Collisson gave was working with the first 10 people as much as possible before hiring them. We also have to understand whether a certain position is right for that person or not. The next step is understanding what the person looked like on the first day of the interview and what he/she achieved during one month.

John Collison says that in any stage we should focus on two very important things:

1. getting employees up and running them(this way we can find the problems)
2. giving people feedback quickly (so they know how to adapt to the culture)

Another point that I liked a lot is that of Ben Silbermann. He says that we should hire people who use our product religiously every day (or have used, so that we can know what is the barrier that is preventing them from using it). Hiring people who are passionate about our product is a great way to find people.

To conclude, hiring people is a hard process especially when we hire the first 10 employees of our company. In this lecture Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann demonstrated some steps to make the process productive and more straightforward.