Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.
Start-up teams are always in flux, so, like all start-ups, we're always talking to candidates for various key roles.
The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.
When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.
Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
Our team at Duolingo is really cohesive, but this did not just happen. I made a concerted effort to hire people who are going to play nice.
Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first...at least 100 employees and often many more.
From the day Microsoft was started, the only constraint to our growth has been attracting ah, more great programmers, very smart, committed, ah, people. And so we're always on... on the look for ah, that kind of person.
At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.
The most important thing is that you hire people who complement you and are better than you in specific areas. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players.
You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.
When I used to recruit in college, my sole job was to out-recruit what I had. And if I did that, I knew we would grow and be successful.
If you don't hire at least one or two people that are smarter than you are, then you're a terrible manager and I don't need you.
When hiring, mix Harvard Nerds with Chicago Improvisers and stir.
If you want to hire the best people, the best people are already doing pretty impressive things. They have their life plans, their picture for what they want to be doing. To figure out a way in which those trajectories align really takes time.
AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.
... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
Only hire people you want to have dinner with.
Above all else, look around to employ the best talent you possibly can.
Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.
As a small business owner myself, I talk to so many other business owners who delay seasonal hiring by waiting until the last minute to make their temporary hires.
Be really picky with your hiring, and hire the absolute best people you possibly can. People are the most important component of almost every business, and attracting the best talent possible is going to make a huge difference.
For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
Create the kind of workplace and company culture that will attract great talent. If you hire brilliant people, they will make work feel more like play.
Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.
