
Building A Great Core Team - jimbrusstar
http://blog.zactownsend.com/five-lessons-from-building-a-great-core-team-at-standard-treasury
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lpolovets
"Once money is no longer your biggest problem, hiring is."

Very true. After moving to the investment side a little while ago, I've seen
firsthand that when founders are not stressed out about fundraising, they're
stressed out about hiring. If I was to categorize requests that our portfolio
companies have made of us, the breakdown would be something like:

* 50% help with hiring

* 20% introduction requests

* 15% requests for product feedback

* 15% miscellaneous (technical reviews, sitting down and discussing long-term strategy, etc.)

~~~
seivan
Would be cool to know what kind of problems is in hiring? Salaries too high?
Too few people? Not enough within 60 miles?

~~~
lpolovets
Mostly finding high quality candidates (read: engineers), and occasionally
helping with reference checks and vetting of key hires.

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araes
I feel like these people took a lot of wrong lessons from this process,
effectively interpreting lessons in terms of their own confirmation bias.
Every single one of their three great engineers was hired based on
establishing relationships with skilled folks, talking with them, and getting
to know them as people. Lessons 2, 3, & 4? Not bad. Yet lesson 5? Grind their
bones to dust with the most awful of modern hiring concepts - which was used
for exactly 0 of their initial "top-tier code ninja rockstar" hires. They talk
about it being haphazard, but the quote about evaluating people based on your
"full-of-shit-meter" is almost spot on.

Why do we keep insisting that hiring not be based on people?

If people are motivated, quality, self-learning staff, they'll pick up
whatever language, or API, or widget you throw at them. And if they're crap,
they're crap. All four hours of tech. grilling is going to tell you is that
you won't have to spend a couple weeks at slightly lower efficiency while they
code using a language reference, or looking on StackExchange, rather than
doing it from memory. What it won't reveal is that they're lazy, they just
memorized a bunch of common tests, they can't actually think, or can't solve
fuzzy problems you don't know you'll have. If you want hammers, then go buy a
hammer, but if we want people, then we should stop beating our heads against
walls, and go hire people.

Paraphrasing of one of my favourite West Wing quotes:

There was a man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the
river was going to rush up and flood the town. And that all the residents
should evacuate their homes. But the man said, "I’m religious. I pray. God
will save me."

The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, "Hey, hey
you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety." But the
man shouted back, "God will save me."

A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, "Hey
you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll
take you to safety." But the man shouted back that he prayed, and that God
will save him.

Well...the man drowned. And standing at the gates, he said "I’m religious, I
pray, I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?"

The response? "I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a
rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?"

~~~
patrickmay
> They talk about it being haphazard, but the quote about evaluating people
> based on your "full-of-shit-meter" is almost spot on.

>

> Why do we keep insisting that hiring not be based on people?

You need to combine the best of both worlds. Hiring, especially for startups,
is stressful for both parties. Having a process makes it less likely that
things like reference checks will get dropped and gives everyone a checklist
and timeframe for making a decision.

That being said, the process should incorporate the "full-of-shit-meter" to
stop wasting everyone's time as early as possible in the case of a bad match.

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gjmulhol
I would argue that hiring is not the biggest problem: people are. Hiring,
firing, and management are all critical. Early on, finding people is about
finding trust, motivation, and (to some extent) skills. Firing is about
identifying that something isn't working out and ending it -- you cannot keep
people around that hurt the company, they are a cancer and should be removed.
Managing people is often forgotten and really important. Happy employees are
better employees, they are motivated, care, and create a better work product.

With all that said, I like some of these messages. Always be recruiting and
create a process are both really important. The latter of these does not mean
to create bureaucracy, it just means to be deliberate about who you bring on.

