Scaling founder obsession (the F+1 problem)

I spent last week walking around the mountains and parks of Wyoming which was a delightful change from London. In between coyotes, eagles and a grizzly bear, I read a few things including Paul Graham’s Founder Mode post and MrBeast’s leaked onboarding doc. 

A photo of an actual place in the world (Wyoming is remarkable)

It’s always interesting to see who is surprised by notes like these. Founders tend to shrug and go ‘obviously’, investors tend to eyeroll slightly and then copy whatever their founders are doing and journalists are horrified. 

Fundamentally (or at least to me), these documents are both responses to the fundamental company-building question of how to scale founder obsession (the F+1 problem). Specifically it’s clear they’re written with a common trauma of hiring badly. Notice I did not say ‘hiring the wrong people’. Hiring (senior) people into your company is an exercise in assessing their compatibility with your obsession. It is, in my experience, one of the most difficult things to do well and we spend oddly little time discussing it. Worse, and at the risk of changing the title of this newsletter to ‘everything is survivorship bias’, I feel a great deal of senior hiring advice and experience tends to under-emphasise time and place factors and over-emphasise org design factors. Sometimes success teaches you very little.

I was looking back at ~20 years of startup notes to see all the dumb things I’ve done in this area. And some of them are very, very dumb (although they did eventually lead to some quite good onboarding docs). As ever, this is not advice (take some or none of it) but here are four particularly useful mistakes from a much larger number:

Non-startup people believe they know what a startup will be like

One of my favourite questions to ask candidates is what they think their day-to-day will be like if they join. What I’m really trying to interrogate is ‘what is your required support infrastructure to do your job?’. Whether it’s travel booking, doing your own expenses or something similar, I guarantee you there will be some kind of expectation divergence lurking. The bigger ones can kill you. 

Lifers are rarely good hires (let them go somewhere else first)

‘I’ve found the perfect person, they’ve been in Google for 10yrs’. I’ve had so many versions of this conversation. Look, I’ll be wrong about this sometimes but in general I would not hire this person unless there was something incredibly specific (maybe engineering?) about them. Institutionalised people are extremely hard to evaluate and, aside from falling into the trap above, simply don’t realise how much of their success comes from the door-opening which their (current) employer brings. 

For the love of God, do reference checks

Call the references they give you. Then call at least five more people. For every level of seniority above VP, call five more (so for C-level, you should be speaking with 15 people, I’m not kidding). The amount of time that some moderate reference-checking has saved me from making regrettable hires is matched only by the amount of times that HR professionals and lawyers made growling noises when they found out about it. 

Do proper interview training 

Most humans are terrible at assessing other humans. While I would also suggest you read some Daniel Kahneman before you jump into an interview, a slightly more scaleable approach might be to do some actual interview training and then ensure that everyone else on your team does the same.