
The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal - jkopelman
http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-hire-the-best-engineers-at-PayPal
======
npalli
How long is Max Levchin going to milk the Paypal story. For crying out loud,
it was 12 years ago - an eternity in the industry. How come all these great
ideas didn't work for the next 12 years he has been trying to build other
companies.

~~~
andyjsong
He's trying: <https://affirm.com/jobs>

~~~
npalli
Interesting, thanks. I thought Max Levchin was trying to get you pregnant.
Just announced yesterday at D11.

[http://allthingsd.com/20130529/max-levchins-new-plan-to-
get-...](http://allthingsd.com/20130529/max-levchins-new-plan-to-get-you-
pregnant-and-improve-health-care-in-the-process/)

~~~
minimaxir
Pregnancy or e-payment. Clearly it's a 50/50 hedge bet.

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smacktoward
So all the best engineers on the market just happened to have gone to school
with Levchin, and all the best business types on the market just happened to
have gone to school with Peter Thiel.

What an amazing coincidence!

~~~
samfisher83
Well they did go to Stanford and UIUC. Arguably the best school for business
and the birthplace of the browser, and one of the best comp sci schools in the
country.

I think the point is that he hired people he knew.

~~~
sjg007
this is what they call meritocracy.

~~~
omonra
If you could show that either university is not meritocratic in their
application process, you would have a point.

~~~
sjg007
[http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Meritocracy-Classics-
Organization...](http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Meritocracy-Classics-Organization-
Management/dp/1560007044)

~~~
omonra
Thank you - I had a look at the book description and I don't see how it makes
your point (regardless of whether the author is an authority on the subject)

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jtbigwoo
> diversity of thought slows you down

What a fascinating idea. I suppose if you don't know whether you're going the
right direction you might as well try to get there as fast a possible.

I worked for a while with a bunch of former video game developers at a non-
game company. They got an amazing amount of work done, but they also just did
what they wanted without discussing it. They just assumed that everybody would
naturally agree with them so they didn't see any problem with sending a note
to the rest of the team that said, "We've changed the signature of most of the
UI method calls. The build now has 5,000 errors. Please make changes to your
code."

~~~
jfarmer
Given the PayPal story, which started with the company being encryption
software to beam money between Palm Pilots, that couldn't possibly be what Max
meant. They definitely didn't "know whether [they were] going in the right
direction."

What he means, I think, is that at an early stage startup the cost of
coordination is very high. When you have 5 people working together you almost
want a hive mind. If part of everyone's mutual understanding includes how,
when, and why to change course then the cost of potentially sticking with the
wrong thing for too long is far outweighed by the cost of coordination.

Your example is the opposite of what I take him to mean, viz., in a small team
where everyone understands _how_ to operate independently and has a deep,
mutual understanding then nobody's going to introduce a breaking change that
leaves the other 4 people flat footed at a critical time.

~~~
aswanson
He's putting his own cognitive narrative on a singular event. A few things
change (they dont connect with elon, they dont give up on the palm pilot as a
focus, etc) and the story ends radically different, to negative effect. Truth
is, sometimes, if you bust your ass in the right place at the right time, shit
goes marvelously to your favor. Or not. Either way.

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cascas
"Hire everyone you know at Stanford." NEAT TRICK. Also "ignore diversity of
thought," and apparently diversity of almost everything else. Absolutely
stupid.

~~~
newnewnew
Is there any value in diversity for its own sake?

If I'm trying to build a rocket to go to Mars, give me the best people, not
the people that would look best in a university recruiting photograph.

~~~
crazygringo
There is. But racial diversity has nothing to do with it.

The more diverse the backgrounds and thought patterns are of people on a team,
the more likely they'll think of and consider solutions and paths that might
not have been considered otherwise -- or see pitfalls in them.

If you're building a rocket to go to Mars, you absolutely want as much
diversity in your engineering backgrounds as possible (assuming everyone
already meets the engineering requirements in the first place).

~~~
newnewnew
Have you ever worked with someone that really gets the way you think? It's
refreshing. The communication overhead is very low.

It seems I spend a great deal of my time trying to communicate things I
already know with people of "diverse" thinking styles.

Don't worry about people being robotic clones of each other. It almost never
happens. There is diversity enough without seeking out more blatant diversity.

~~~
wavefunction
I've learned an awful lot from people who think very differently than me. They
make me reconsider my assumptions and quite often lead to a better solution.

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caycep
"strongest technical teams in silicon valley history"?

So much for the guys who invented the silicon transistor, the microprocessor.
the Macintosh team must have been small fries.

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jurassic
TLDR: Cronyism works well if all your college bros are top talent.

~~~
spinlock
OR: survivorship bias lets you make all sorts of unfounded claims.

~~~
rhizome
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

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general_failure
This is one of those 'success has many parents'. Most of these stories are
semi-made up after success.

~~~
jacques_chester
Success is like failure: it only exists backwards in time.

Generally we take a hammer and beat the messy chaos of reality until it
resembles the monomyth.

------
aswanson
190+ IQ's. Now I understand why slide was such a triumph in the myspace
Picfeed Battle of 2006.

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lumens
Seems like a number of comments are missing the good here. A quick summary of
my takeaways:

\- Ability to leverage talent to speedy outcomes _is_ the competitive
advantage of startups. Lean heavily on this.

\- Startups habitually underestimate their ability to attract top talent.
Don’t submit to this line of thinking, or at minimum work to prove your
hypothesis of impossibility.

\- One should be ruthless in early shaping of company culture. Certain things
are absolutely necessary to get right -- this is one.

\- The things that scare away second tier talent can actually attract top tier
people. Like focusing product development on your ideal user, one should focus
hiring energies on ideal hires.

~~~
alan_cx
All of which is summed up by the comments about people from one particular
university.

Point by point: Easy to leverage people you went to uni with Easy to attract
top talent, if you went to uni with it Ruthless? If you mean selecting from a
single know talent pool, sure. You'll probably scare away 2nd tier talent, if
you a already populated with your mates from a top uni.

OK, those are bitter and twisted replies, but being British, I know all about
closed shop universities and mates giving mates jobs. Old School Tie we call
it. Have a look at our government....

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jacques_chester
"One crazy trick. HR managers hate him!"

Let's stop looking for crazy tricks. Generally, there aren't any.

Some stuff is simple, some stuff is complicated.

------
brryant
There are no tricks in this story, just a philosophy that he believed in, and
strictly adhered to.

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thelarry
What is paypay? Am I the only one that noticed that?

~~~
wyclif
No, I'm a proofreader. I wondered the same thing.

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pinaceae
this thing worked _once_ for him. that's not a valid sample. all these great
stories out of startups that were plain lucky to be in the right place in the
right time. it wasn't technology that made paypal big - who gives a shit how
they hired coders?

