Joe Kraus, an Excite co-founder and startup entrepreneur, writes about founding, hiring, and persistence in startups.
HN commenters link his posts on hiring without false positives, the Stockdale Paradox, and Excite's persistence as advice for startup founders.
Key points:
The challenge for a startup is four fold:
1. Screen out folks with negative productivity in the interview process.
2. Avoid screening out potential employees who have great strengths in addition to some obvious weaknesses.
3. Attract, hire, and retain enough strong players from the start to complete your first product in a timely fashion.
4. Fire anyone who made an initially strong impression but who is actually negatively impacting the performance of the team (more broadly: identify and eliminate sources of negative productivity).
This last category, the “Plus Minus People,” are only truly dangerous if you don’t have the ability to detect and acknowledge that you have made a mistake.
Joe Kraus has argued that it’s better to be completely conservative and avoid any “false positives” but my experience has shown that allowing some leeway with a contracting or probationary period to make a final assessment allows some ultimately strong contributors to also be recruited who may have made a negative impression on some members of the team. There is also a value in having folks with diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the team (Doug Hall states that leverage diversity is the second law of capitalist creativity in "Jumpstart Your Business Brain," observing that “You exponentially multiply the power of stimuli when you seek the ideas, opinions, and judgments of people with diverse perspectives.”
You are always better served to select a candidate who has made a…
The lesson? Don't hold the champagne. Joe Kraus made this point well at Startup School from his experience. While it seems less substantial than some other points about starting a business, like how to get to the champagne moments in the first place, it is important. It's important for what you remember and make the experience about when you're starting your business.
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/10/moons_over_my_h.html
In the same vein as how Microsoft sold IBM an OS that didn't exist, one of my favorite stories is Excite bidding $3 million to be on Netscape's browser circa 1996 or so (while having $1 million in the bank), prodded on by Vinod Khosla (they didn't get the deal, but it's still a great move).
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/persistence_pay_1.html
For me it was the name of his book and the thinking behind it "Only the Paranoid Survive".
The other similar article that I can think of is Joe Kraus of excite talking about "Startups & the stockdale paradox": http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/01/startups_and_th.html
Great question. This reminded me of Joe Kraus's article on the subject. He makes a compelling case:
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/hiring_no_false.html
Yup, here's another inspiring one: http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/always_take_a_c.html
Joe Kraus' story of how Excite got funded.
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