

Startups Must Hire The Right People And Watch Every Penny. Or Fail. - transburgh
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/08/startups-must-hire-the-right-people-and-watch-every-penny/

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pg
Necessary but not sufficient conditions. To get the complete recipe you need
to add one more thing: to make something customers actually want.

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brlewis
In a lot of cases you can partner with great people instead of hiring them.

To enhance ourdoings.com with online photo editing I just had to read
Snipshot's API docs. To enable a super fancy comment system I just integrated
with Disqus. I stopped hating slideshows when I tried piclens, and they're
integrated too.

So follow his advice that the first employees must be perfect. If you can't
hire perfect, find an alternative to hiring.

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mpc
Couldn't agree more.

The point about how some startups go from launching on 200k to raising 5mm and
then spending 200k a month was right on. After closing a big round of vc
funding it's so tempting give yourself a huge raise etc....and so deadly.

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dusklight
I agree mostly but just want to add:

If your entire company is going to fail from just one bad hire, you need to
re-examine your processes.

It's the nature of the game. Some people are more capable than others. Of
course try to get the most capable people you can, but in between superstar
and loser, there are a lot of people who can create more value than the total
cost of hiring them. (counted in terms of compensation but also training time
from other employees, botched tasks while they are learning the ropes, etc
etc)

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marcus
When your company has hundreds of workers, you're right it isn't going to fail
because of one bad hire, although one bad hire can lead to slow bozofication
of your workforce, I know companies where you can quite accurately predict how
many years ago a person was hired based on his competence (there are obviously
exceptions but as a rule the better an employee is the earlier he was hired).

But when your team is 2-5 people you just can't afford to hire people who have
a relatively small positive net value you need the superstars or at least rock
solid developers, anything else will hurt your startup. Productivity is
diminished in large teams, so don't add a body to your count if isn't going to
make a difference. Building a startup is hard enough don't hurt your chances
by settling on anything less.

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cstejerean
I strongly agree with 99% of this post. But I don't agree with the:

"Three weeks vacation? Not going to happen."

It doesn't cost you anything to offer a decent amount of vacation. That's
probably the best way to avoid burning out your highly motivated hackers. Give
them some time off when they need it and they'll come back with even more
energy and drive.

