Great talents

Your best employee is going to quit.

Because you keep hiring people they have to carry.

A-players want to work with A-players.

Every mediocre hire is a resignation letter to your top performer.

So stop optimizing your hiring for risk reduction. Stop hiring resumes. Stop filtering for pedigree and years of experience.

Hire for the only thing that matters: intent.

The skills, the knowledge, the domain expertise, can be learned.

Great talents care about their work

But you cannot teach someone to care. And if you're trying to, you've already lost.

If someone cares enough, shows up consistently & try their best no matter how imperfect it seems, do everything you can to keep them. Give them all the training they need to do well. Alignment & intent is hard to find.

Most people live life like this.

Clock in, do whatever minimum you gotta do, clock out.

Wait for instructions, wait for Friday, wait for someone else to care first.

I've worked with a broad range of talents and the best ones are the ones who don't need to be managed.

They see a problem and it bothers them until it's fixed. They won't leave their monkeys (problems) with you. They've already have it solved and just update you on what they did to align.

Just try and focus a on how they talk. Most of the time, they say things like "we should" not "someone should." They say "I tried this" not "that won't work" without trying excessively first.

Great talents want to connect with the company as individuals

They see what you're building and think "I want to be part of that".

They put in more effort to connect with you, connect with the team, get to know each others lives and reciprocate bids for connection.

Literally, it's night and day when you're working with someone who's a "friend" vs working with someone who's just here to clock in and clock out. Don't want to engage, don't want to connect at all.

The real ones I worked with care more about the mission, the problems, the vision.

Not just the health insurance and PTO policy.

If someone's not gonna join you because your health insurance policy isn't good enough, they probably don't care enough about the company to begin with.

And honestly that's okay, you don't need everyone to care like they own the business. Corporates don't grow to their size of 1000s of employees and ensure every single one of them care so much about the business mission and goals. Most are just making a living.

But as a startup that's building for a greater mission, you need people who care. You're not hiring 1000 people. You're probably hiring 10. Each hire is 10% of the company. In a corporate with 1000 people, each hire is 0.1% of the company.

If you're 10% of the company you're bound to make some real impact and bring some real value to the table.

If you can only really have 10 people in your team, wouldn't you want them to be people who care more than just a payslip? I'd say have high requirements and prioritise your founding team of 10. Take as long as you need to interview, and pay top dollar for them to come work with you.

They are the ones who will be making all the impact to the trajectory of your company.

They want skin in the game. They want their name attached to the outcome. They want to build something they can point to and say "I made that."

Great talents will "figure it out"

This is the entire job description.

"Figure it out" means: I don't have the answer right now, but I will by tomorrow.

I'll Google it, ask someone, try three different approaches, break it down, prototype it, test it.

The opposite is: "I don't know how to do that" and then... silence. Waiting for you to solve it. Waiting for a training. Waiting for someone else.

People who figure things out are exhausting to compete with and effortless to work with.

I trust people who can figure things out. I don't manage them. I don't need to. And that's the ideal world I live in.

Set goals, align on some key strategies, then get out of their way. They'll be smart and hardworking enough to figure it out in their own ways, and I'll just check in with them every now and then to cheer them on.

I don't even care about their pedigree

A great university on a resume means they were smart at 18 and good at tests.

It doesn't mean they ship well and ship fast.

Some of the best people I've worked with have weird resumes.

Community college, self-taught, switched careers at 30, worked at a failed startup you've never heard of.

Some of the worst people I've hired had perfect pedigrees and couldn't solve a problem without a framework and three meetings.

The resume is a proxy. It's a signal. You'll need more information.

Stop hiring proxies.

I don't care about age and years of experience

"10 years of experience" is a made-up number on a made-up rubric.

While experience is valuable, it usually comes with a high price. I pay consultants and speak to mentors much more experienced than myself to pick their brain and align on a strategy.

The high price that comes with experience also comes with a variable risk. They could be bullshitting, they could have experience that cannot directly translate to your company (for whatever reason - diff timing, diff budgets, diff market, diff culture, a million reasons).

As a startup you don't have infinite bullets. When you hire for experience, they increase your burn rate significantly.

I'm not saying to not hire for experience, I'm saying the risk would be higher if it doesnt end up well. If it does, it's worth all the money in the world.

The point I'm trying to make is to vet talents for their competency, not for their "years of experience" written on their CV.

I've seen 24-year-olds with better judgment than 45-year-olds. Time and time again.

I've seen people with 15 years in an industry who learned nothing because they never had to think. They were just following processes. Maintaining the engines built by their founding teams.

Startups need people to build, not maintain.

Here's what matters more: have you done hard things? Have you figured things out when no one was there to help you? Have you shipped something real?

Age and years are just another lazy filter for people who don't want to actually evaluate talent.

Engineering brain is a fat plus

Not because I need them to code (though that helps).

Because engineering teaches you to break down problems.

To think in systems. To prototype and iterate instead of planning forever.

Engineers are trained to try things. Logically. See what happens. Then evaluate from there. Didn't work? Ok tweak this other variable and see what happens. Rinse and repeat.

They build v1, see what breaks, fix it, ship v2.

That mindset transfers to everything.

Marketing, operations, sales, strategy. "Let me try this and see what happens" beats "let me research this for three weeks" every time.

A-players want to work with other A-players

Your best person is watching who you hire.

I've been fortunate to have a few key players in my team in the first few years of business. They carried the team and I'll forever be grateful to them.

But these stories don't last forever.

I wasn't at a stage where I appreciated the fact that A-players value working with other A-players so much.

I didn't realise until usually nearing the end of the persons tenure with you, they reveal it.

Or one time I saw 2 of my A-players working together, brainstorming, solving problems, self-initiating new campaigns, fixing processes and operational gaps across departments, then I realised "Damn, I need that".

Every time you hire someone mediocre, your A-player thinks: "So that's the bar now? That's who I'm building this with?"

A players are competitive. They want to be challenged. They want to work with people who make them better, not people they have to carry.

They take feedback positively, they want more feedback, they thank you for it and look to how they can improve.

B/C-players get overly sensitive and defensive with feedback.

You don't lose A players to competitors. You lose them to the B/C-players you hired.

Hire for intent, everything else can be taught

You can teach -> your product, your tools, your process, your market, your stack.

You cannot teach -> giving a shit.

If someone cares, they'll learn. They'll ask questions, watch videos, read docs,

THEY'LL FIGURE IT OUT.

If someone doesn't care, no amount of training will fix it. They'll nod in the onboarding, forget it by Friday, and ask you the same question next month.

Intent is the only thing that matters. Everything else is just time.

Great talents make problems smaller, not bigger

Bad hires turn small problems into meetings. They see a problem and escalate everyone. Get everyone to help fix it for them.

Even worse, they make exceptions and change processes to make their lives easier without considering the bigger picture.

Without solving the root problem from first principles.

And if they keep doing this, small problems eventually become big problems because they don't solve it, just slap duct tapes around it.

Good hires turn big problems into solved problems.

They contain the mess, fix it, document it, move on. The work that happens behind the scene. Nobody even knows sometimes, they don't need that.

Every person either raises the complexity or lowers it.

Watch what happens when they touch something.

Great talents take ownership, not credit

When something goes wrong, bad hires explain why it's not their fault.

Cover their ass first. Then call it a day.

Problem not solved for the business, but problem solved for them as long as they cover their ass.

Good hires explain what they're going to do about it.

You want people who own outcomes.

People who ask "why" not "how"

"How do I do this task?" = waiting for instructions

"Why are we doing this?" = understanding and thinking about the actual problem.

The best people question whether you're solving the right problem in the first place. They help you see your blind posts and suggest better ways to fix things.

Sometimes they push back. Sometimes they suggest a completely different approach. That's not insubordination, that's really thinking about a solution with you, not just blindly doing something for the sake of it.

People who default to action

"Let me try something and show you tomorrow" vs "Let me think about it and we can discuss next week."

Both has its merits. But from my experience, the best people always have a bias toward doing. They'd rather build a bad first version than have a perfect meeting about it.

Analysis paralysis is a disease. Cut it out and start shipping better.

People who communicate clearly

Say what you mean. Be clear with your words.

Write emails your boss/colleagues don't have to read twice.

Explain complex things simply. Use simple words.

The worst ones are the ones who just complicate the simplest things.

Whether to sound smart, to hide behind complexity or to just save time and be lazy by sending over work copy-pasted from GPT, it's all unacceptable to me.

Clear thinking = clear communication. Unclear communication = unclear thinking.


People who've failed at something hard

Perfect track records are suspect.

No one has perfect track records.

Everything worth achieving is hard.

And hard things have a high failure rate.

Show me someone who's never failed and I'll show you someone who's never tried anything difficult.

The best people have scar tissue. They can tell you their real story and real experience on what they did and why they failed.

Started something that didn't work? Been at a company that imploded? Made the wrong bets and suffered losses?

Failure is data.

No failures = no risk = no growth.