Hi Colin,
I'm writing this as a blog post. Hopefully you (& others) who are early in their entrepreneurial journey would find this helpful as you try to formulate concrete principles or tangible criteria for your internal hiring processes when the time comes to get serious about who you bring onto the org.
Lastly, I would like to say thank you. This (above all else) is perhaps more useful for me than it is for you (😅). As you know, writing is thinking. Thus, in the process of externalizing my ideas, I will understand them more clearly. I will also free up some mental RAM. And others may find this useful as well. I've strung together my Early Hiring Principles from my personal experiences + accounts of the greats (thank you Substack & Long Form Podcasting).
Enough foreplay, let's get into it…
The single most important premise that you will get out of this is the [early] team you build is the company you build. When in the nascent stages of any ambitious undertaking, each additional hire substantially changes the dynamic. I am willing to go on record that early team formation is perhaps more influential than your ultimate idea (as your vision will inevitably evolve many times over). The team you build will be intelligent & dynamic enough to navigate such terrain and identify & capitalize on the "contrarian truth's" in society. Putting together your team and incentivizing them with a central organizing principle/moral innovation is perhaps the most important thing to index on as a founder early in your journey.
The reasoning for this is many, but for the purposes of this piece, I will posit it is because of 2 basic observations of human nature encapsulated (surprisingly well) by economic theory: I) Path Dependence & II) Marginalism. I) is necessary because the first few hires set the norms, and it becomes cognitively expensive as an organization to abandon the "this is how we do things here" heuristic even if these procedures are gravely suboptimal. Malfunctioning institutions in our country such as Healthcare and Education suffer from this. By adhering to the rigid status quo, you are boxed into a particular form of doing things, even when it is evidently disadvantageous to be doing them how they are being done. The intuition of this is when you are doing something government related (like going to the DMV) & you know it could be done 10x cheaper, faster, better but you settle for the inefficient way because "juice is not worth the squeeze". Don't be the DMV, recognize path dependence and lead early from a basis of sound principle. II) is important as each additional hire changes the dynamic of the team radically. Going form 5-6 is a 20% increase in team size, and the wrong person could derail the entire synergy. I often hear people say "oh we should contract a moonlighter" or "I have all the ideas but you just code it". If you settle for such mediocrity, then prepare to accept the outcome of a mediocre company.
A stupidly simple declaration is: If you hire mediocre people, you will have a mediocre company. If you hire exceptional people & motivate them through a compelling ideological intuition, you will create an exceptional company.
But what are some general principles to look for in assembling an early team?
- They must hold deep ideological convictions. The early people you bring into any impactful organization must be highly disagreeable people with deeply held beliefs constructed from first principles. These individuals must be idiosyncratic in some way. Someone who is instinctively iconoclastic, someone who defaults to challenging norms expectations. These people have generally gone through a set of experiences, or are of a particularly neurological disposition to opt-out of mimetic trivialities. What makes this person is besides the point, but what is important here is that they clearly defy convention in some astute way. The way to look for this is by certainly doing the disagreeable truth test popularized by Thiel, but there are many other ways you can tease this instinct out by asking your prospective hire for a pithy, headliner response on the spot. A paradox to bring up is are they disagreeable but can they collaborate with others? This dialectic is critical.
- Intellectual curiosity: This can typically be teased out by hearing them speak about their interests. The quality of their mind will shine through when they have a blank canvas to authentically express them. Will they critique Foucault, talk to you about the beauty of Ingmar Bergman Films, Reactionary movements, share their fascination with Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations, Building an Automated Tarot Machine in 24 hours using Raspberry Pi? How authentically interesting are they? Do they speak with a passion for their craft void of performativity? Do they seem like the kind of person who you see actually interested in the thing they tell you they are interested in? If the person resonates with anything reminiscent of the above, then
- High Discernability: Intellectual Curiosity is necessary but not sufficient, not for a great hire in a mission drive company at least. This might be read as paradoxical, but you must look for someone that is open-minded enough to embrace new ideas, but discernible enough to eliminate perhaps many compelling ideas & focus on what is the most important. The Jobism "Innovation is saying no to 1000 things" encapsulates this idea. A person must simultaneously be hyper-curious, but have the internal judgment to identify what is the most important thing to be thinking about or doing in any given period of time. In a startup, this dialectic is the most important in a situation with finite time, people, resources & a ticking clock to pursue greatness.
- Agency, Ambition, Action: Fuck it, we just did an alliteration. These are more obviously logistical things but they get overlooked and are actually very important knobs to tune in addition to everything else. Pardon my French in this section, but can this person actually get shit done? Do they have a propensity to produce. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has a one liner I really like: "Action Produces Information". When in doubt, just do something & get a signal and iterate accordingly. When doing a startup you must absolutely have to reconcile your grand ambitions with the cold, stark operational reality of running a living, breathing startup. This is different from a mindless utility optimizer, but also different from an ivory tower arm chair academic who sits around indefinitely caught up in the weight of his ideas with no actual grounding in the temporal reality. A virtuous man creates a self reinforcing mechanism blending theory & practice. Augustine's City of God & City of Man. You must understand your pursuit is grand, but you must be grounded in temporality. In starting a startup you must simultaneously think on a grand, visionary scale - but also be grounded in a stark operational reality in which nothing happens, if nothing fucking happens.1 So you must see if this person can actually do the thing. Yes they can talk. Yes, they are brilliant and have ideas. But the strongest determining factor to index on is if they can create a translation layer to relentlessly execute their ideas against reality. Can they write the manifesto, then ship the prototype? The world will increasingly favor the "thinker-doer", so ensure that you can get people that don't just think, but do and vice versa. Give them a project for a week, have them turn it around with an artifact and justify their intuition.
- Can They Keep on Keeping On?: Quick one but obvious thing I wanted to mention, can they move past failure and fuck ups? Do they learn from mistakes, and have the resilience to move past rejection and/or discouragement? This is courage, and I think it can be cultivated. Immigrants who come to the US are predisposed to having lots of courage from existential and/or familial pressures. It is survival for most. This helps. But if they are wealthy, or are in their early 20s and have worked hard in their life to get into college and the hardest thing they had to overcome was "preparing for a difficult exam" in school, then oh boy they are going to get a sobering taste of the real world when they embark on the startup journey. But per our previous point, action produces information, so…
- A note on Credentials: Lots of people still treat an elite degree as a strong signal of an exceptional mind. It isn't, at least not for the specific thing I care about, which is independent, first-principles thinking. Here's the simple reason. A signal is useful only when it separates the people you want from the people you don't. And an Ivy+ degree fails that test, because both groups have it. Yes, plenty of original thinkers went to elite schools, but so did a vastly larger number of brilliant conformists, the people who spent eighteen years perfectly optimizing for exactly what gatekeepers wanted. When a trait is common in both the group you want and the group you don't, spotting it tells you almost nothing.
I think that more or less concludes it. If anything comes up I will add it but this covers everything top of mind that I deem to be most important in doing this.
If you follow these hiring guidelines, in the words of Naval Ravikant, "Relax, victory is assured"...
Thanks,
Max Ruskowski
1 Striking a balance is key and my unique swing to this is I would recommend lots more people try to incorporate a meditative practice in their day and/or sensory deprivation. Giving your mind a place to think, to reflect, to process is key for a decision maker. If you are running a huge company, your decision impacts many people & arguably the course of civilization. Steve Jobs would famously go on walks daily. You don't want to be a utility optimizing-Zombie.