38 Quotes from Ben Silbermann, John Collison and Patrick Collison on Company Culture and Building a Team
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 11
Published in
4 min readOct 29, 2014
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 11
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
Ben Silbermann
- “I looked for people I wanted to work with and that I thought were talented.”
- 1/ “People think culture is like architecture where its actually a lot more like gardening.”
- 2/ “You plant some seeds and pull out weeds that aren’t working.”
- “I looked at 3 or 4 things that I really valued in people. I looked for people that worked hard, and seemed high integrity and low ego.”
- “I looked for people that were creative, and that usually meant they were really curious and had all these different interests.”
- “…really creative quirky people that are excited about many disciplines and are extraordinary at one, tend to build really great products.”
- “Learning what good and bad is during the interview process is extremely expensive.”
- “Really great people want to do things that are hard. They want to solve tough problems.”
- “I think it’s really important even as companies get bigger that you don’t white wash the risks.”
- “You’re very very transparent about why you think it’s an amazing opportunity. But you lay out in gory detail why it’s going to be hard.”
- 1/ “I’ll try to ask something that makes the question which is very soft, feel a little bit more quantitative and calibrate that over time.”
- 2/ “In evaluating this person in this dimension, are they in the top 1% of people you’ve ever worked with, the top 5% in the top 10%?”
- “References are also a tremendous source of new recruits.”
- “We would always try to remind people like where we wanted to go someday. It’s really when you first join to drop someone into a problem.”
- “The goal is to make the teams feel as autonomous and nimble as possible within the constraints of having a large organization”
- “That means that over time we’re always trying to make it feel like a startup of many startups, rather than this monolithic organization”
- “1 of the big benefits of working at a startup is that you can be handed a challenge that no one else would be crazy enough to give you.”
- “As the company goes farther along, your aspirations therefore get bigger.”
- “There’s all this startup wisdom that sounds really reasonable, but it’s only useful if it works in your particular circumstance.”
John Collison
- “No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.”
- “If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they’re probably working in a job and very happy with that.”
- “You can relax 1 constraint. You can relax the fact that they’re talented, or you can relax that it’s apparent that they’re talented.”
- “Especially for named references, people want to be nice so you have to do things like create an artificial scarcity.”
- “When we have engineers start, we’ll try to get them committing on the first day.”
- “When we have people in business roles start, we’ll have them in real meetings on the first day.”
- “I think sometimes there’s a tendency to be tentative and help ease people in- we’re much more the push people of the cliff school.”
- “Everything from high level how you’re doing at your job to minor cultural pointers, the more feedback you can give the better they’ll do.”
- “Finding people who are passionate about your product can be a great way to find people.”
Patrick Collison
- “I think culture to some degree is basically to some degree the resolution to a bandwidth problem.”
- “The fraction of things you can be involved in directly, is diminishing almost exponentially…”
- “The first 10 people you hire…are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first 10 people, you’re actually hiring 100 people”
- “…you should think of each one of those people as bringing along sort of 10 other people with them.”
- “You have to think like a value investor. You’re looking for the human capital that’s significantly undervalued by the market”
- “There’s a lot of people who are really excited about tons of things. Only a subset of those are excited about completing things.”
- “Every single API request that generated an error, went to all of our inboxes and phoned all of us.”
- “In life, in the media, and everything people focus way too much on founders.”
- “Either your company fails very quickly or all of your problems become about managing growth.”
- “At most large companies, what is locally optimal for you is very frequently not what is globally optimal for the company.”
Also, you can watch the entire lecture for yourself here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec11/
If you liked this post, please click on ‘Recommend’ button below and follow the collection I’ve created for “How to Start a Startup”. Others may stumble upon my post and it will motivate me to continue this exercise for the rest of the course. Thanks.
Also, you can follow me on Twitter @RajenSanghvi
Image Credit: Screenshot taken from Stanford CS183B Lecture 11 Video
