3 Secret Weapons for Entrepreneurs

Why are companies like Amazon, Uber and Google so successful? ​ Each company has nailed three core fundamentals…

Fundamentals that I’ve personally dedicated 2016 to researching, learning and teaching…

They are (1) Hiring, (2) Culture and (3) Experimentation.

If you get these three core competencies right, you’ve got a shot at consistent entrepreneurial success.

If you can figure out how to source, hire, interview and recruit the best talent…

And then if you can stick that talent into a culture that sustains their passion and enthusiasm…

And finally, give that talent a mechanism for continuous experimentation and innovation…

You are likely to build a company that can create incredible value and solve very difficult problems.

Learning The Basics — Building From First Principles

Over the course of my next few blogs, I am going to interview some of the greatest operators around today and share with you what I learn.

These entrepreneurs and executives know the ins and outs of creating these systems. We are going to talk about their successes, their failures, their challenges, their creative approaches, and much, much more.

My goal is to extract the tactics and tools you can use to create amazing processes around hiring, culture and experimentation.

Doing so will certainly not be easy — if it was, every company would be operating at the level of these massively successful organizations.

However, I am dedicated to learning how to make this straightforward enough that any entrepreneur can begin trying these strategies.

At a high level, here are some of the key questions I want to answer and topics I will explore:

Hiring

• How do the best companies hire the best people?
• Why do “A’s hire A’s,” but “B’s Hire Cs”?
• How do you source, attract and hire the most talented people?
• What are the best interview questions and most unique interview styles?
• What are the best rapid screening mechanisms? How do you automate it?
• How do you gamify hiring?
• How do you ensure a new hire fits your culture and team?
• How do you test a new hire in a real-life work scenario?
• How do you test the quality of their work?
• Should you be ruthless about hiring the best people?

Culture

• What is culture?
• How do you create it? Can you create it? Who creates it?
• How do you maintain it? Evolve it?
• Why does every company need very strong core values?
• What are the best examples of a strong, productive company culture?
• How does Uber create culture? Amazon? Google? Apple?
• What are some examples of culture creating value?
• How do you invest in ‘culture’?

Experimentation

• Why is experimentation so important?
• How do you create a culture of experimentation?
• How do you incentivize “failing forward”?
• Why should you try to kill your best ideas?
• Should experiments be kept secret?
• Why are hyper growth and experimentation so linked?
• Why should you worry about progress, rather than success?
• How do Amazon, Uber and Google enable experimentation?

These are only a few of the questions I’m asking. If you have others, tweet at me @peterdiamandis and my Entrepreneur-in-Residence @codyrapp with your own.

These questions, and yours, will become my focus.

Join Me

This is the sort of conversation we explore at my 250-person executive mastermind group called Abundance 360.

The program is highly selective. If you’d like to be considered, apply here.

Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.

P.S. Every week I send out a “Tech Blog” like this one. If you want to sign up, go to Diamandis.com and sign up for this and Abundance Insider.

P.P.S. My dear friend Dan Sullivan and I have a podcast called Exponential Wisdom. Our conversations focus on the exponential technologies creating abundance, the human-technology collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Head here to listen and subscribe: a360.com/podcast