A Letter to the Deep Tech founder CTO

Part I: Hiring and Growing your Team

Photo by Guy Kawasaki on Unsplash

All these late nights working on the demo of your MVP have finally paid off. A VC or angel investor has offered your company a term sheet for a seed round. You and your CEO are sharing half a bottle of champagne and talking about next steps. Money is not in the bank yet but you feel bold enough to start voicing a plan for building your tech team. “It is time to substitute [some of] the off-shore team with some local talent” you say. Your CEO nods ambiguously mentally counting dollars.

Now the ceremony is over. You work through your late evening creating lists of candidates, list of reach-outs, lists of skills, lists of job descriptions. Exciting times! You work through the LinkedIn profiles of your friends and competitors, CV after CV. You cross out and rewrite your lists ten times on your tablet. Finally, you check the time, you congratulate yourself on a good day’s work and decide to go to bed.

Next morning, you wake-up with an uneasy feeling. Could it be the demi-bottle of champagne didn’t agree with you? No, your gut is telling you something else. You have missed something. Are things more important than skills and experience? Yes, you have seen time and time again during your graduate studies at the university and as an intern at a corporate research lab. You set out to write the rules of the deep tech founder CTO hiring game. But before you do, you turn to the wisdom of the internet. And you find a letter addressed to you.

7+1 hiring principles for the deep tech founder CTO

1. Hire for flow: You are in this for the long run. You will be facing unseen obstacles and fighting some nasties. You will be having a hard time balancing personal and professional life. You will be managing some drama queens … You might as well make this a fun, learning and productive experience. Hire accordingly. A few decades ago, psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (aka professor most-unpronounceable-surname) wrote a brilliant book about “what makes an experience genuinely satisfying”, namely “a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life,” not to mention a surge in productivity. Measure carefully your limited resources, observe the strong competition, and calculate your slim odds of success. Your only hope for winning is creating a core team of people that can operate in unison “in the zone” producing superhuman results. This is your number one priority. Create a team that “flows”. Avoid people that are not honest communicators and don’t love what they do (see also bullet 5). Select people that share goals and core values; people that are similar but not clones of each other. Select people that are compatible. Also, hire (at least a few people) that you would like hanging out with. If you feel that psychology is your strong suit, hire some consultant to help. But in the end, go with your gut feeling.
2. Hire for agile: You have seen it again and again in a research environment. Islands of brilliance, working alone or in groups of two, maximum three (in research three is a crowd). Read some papers, come up with an idea, refine, implement, refine some more, get results, write paper. Very waterfall, very successful. Like good old Bell Labs. Leaving aside the question of how to tweak agile frameworks to work in a deep tech setting (to be published in Part III of this letter) you are faced with a huge problem. Hiring people that are not only untrained for agile, they are possibly unfit for agile. Waterfall and face-to-face has been working for them up to now. Why adapt to agile and remote? Hire a couple of these people and you can potentially taint your whole deep tech team, especially if they prove to be not only non-believers but anti-agile zealots. A good agility test when hiring newby Ph.D.s, out of the university, is weighting in any open-source project experience and having a close look at their collaboration patterns in general. If in doubt walk away. Better to do without their brilliance versus sacrificing the productivity of your well-oiled agile team. Don’t sacrifice the team for the individual.
3. Hire for culture: Imagine yourself as the king of a tiny island or a leader of a small sect. People are looking up to you to provide the rule of the land, principles, and values to live by (professionally). They are your principles and they are your values. It is your culture. Set it fast and set it early. Communicate it transparently and communicate it often. Hire accordingly. Hire people that share your principles and values, people that fit in, and abide by the cultural rules that you set (see bullet 5 for exceptions). But isn’t, you say, the CEO that defines the culture of the company? No, not for an early-stage deep tech startup. For the first couple of years, your tech team will constitute significantly more than half the company personnel and even more of its brainpower. It is up to you to define the tech team culture. Eventually, the CEO will step in and adjust it. But for now, you are not just the leader of the tech team, you are also their guru.
4. The first 80–20 rule: Most startups are like sinking ships. Your hull is continuously being gutted by an invisible enemy. There are people running everywhere with buckets trying to empty the water and other people trying to mend the holes in your hull. Similarly, in your tech team, there will be A-players that can fix problems and B-players that can dutifully follow orders and get a job done. Hire only 20% of A-players and the rest 80% of B-players. A-players tend to be brilliant but fickle, are often political, and don’t like to be ordered around; after all, they know what they are doing. If you don’t have any A-players, your boat will sink; nobody is mending your hull and your enemy will eventually create enough holes so that no number of B-players can empty the water in time (beware also of the mythical man-month). Have too many and your boat will also sink; nobody is emptying the water!
5. The second 80–20 rule: You are going to war. You have to choose between a bunch of loyal peasants that are not trained for battle or a bunch of sellswords. What to do? Should you choose loyalty over experience? Should you choose love of the game over love of the reward? How should you build your army and prepare them for the battles to come? Well, you are in deep tech. Your war is a long affair of many battles. You will lose some and win some others. There will be hard times when your team’s cohesion and loyalty will be tested. So again follow an 80–20% rule. Choose 80% of your team from a group of people that fit all the criteria described here (bullets 1, 3, 4; always follow bullet 2 no matter what). Make sure they are loyal, subscribe to the vision and the culture. But for 20% of the team, it is ok to choose some of the valley missionaries. They are seasoned in battle and they can teach tons to your team. And help you win some early battles. Hire less and you are prone to defeat; hire more and you are prone to your team imploding into turncoats at the most crucial battle of the war.
6. The island of misfit toys: You are weird. Not bad. Just different. And so are most of the people around you. Congratulations! You have half of the package that every person desires (being different that is). Unfortunately, the other half of that package is that you (and people around you) want to belong. More than anything we are looking for a safe haven in our work or personal relationships; we all need to be accepted especially if we are different. As you interview people and explain the company culture, your vision for the MVP, and the tech, ask them what the perfect workplace would be for them, what makes them tick. You will know that you found a true team member when his eyes lit up. He has found a safe haven and will never willfully leave. It is partially about culture fit. More than that it is about acceptance and true happiness. It is about flow.
7. The fast and the furious: You heard it before. Hire fast. Fire faster. We all make mistakes. Deep down you know them from early on. People are not always what they seem. First impressions bias our less-than-optimal human brains. Even if you are a master psychologist at least one out of ten people you hire will be a bad fit. To make things worse priorities shift all the time. Whatever you do, do it decisively while being respectful of the company culture. It is your culture. And a sign of self-respect.

Last but not least, do all the hiring yourself (up to team size of 100 people). This is your party, your music, your drinks, your people. Yes, friends-of-friends are invited. But you are the person at the door controlling who comes in and who goes out. This core group of people you just hand-picked that share your values and culture will be the future managers that guarantee the health, continuity, and longevity of your brilliant team. Good job!

I trust you already know everything about the skills and roles that your future team required.

If in doubt read on…(to be continued)