

Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup - hsukenooi
https://medium.com/on-startups/d74efec8b1a8
Lessons learned from Decide.com. From my brother&#x27;s basement to $16.5M in funding, 30 employees and acquisition by eBay.
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rybosome
As a former Decide engineer, I'm happy you made the decision to expand so
rapidly. :-)

The point about hiring for agreement is interesting - I'd never considered how
much constant questioning could slow growth. My initial reaction was to worry
about stagnation of ideas, but I think you could still get a lot of diversity
of thought even when being likeminded on a few points. Is it possible to scale
this hiring practice indefinitely?

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hsukenooi
As you know, we were never short on ideas :)

Someone made a good point yesterday. You want to have debates about whether
you should do A.1 or A.2 not A or Z. Even amongst likeminded people (like HH,
BMA, Ian and I) there's plenty of debate.

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umeshunni
Good points, all. I especially like the point about hiring similarly minded
people. Diversity and variety of opinion is necessary in large companies where
risk mitigation is valued, but in a startup, it's better to fail fast and keep
moving.

