OnStartups

5 Startup Hiring Mistakes That Can Crush Your Culture

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, Apr 29, 2013

Remember your first business loan? Or, if you're like many entrepreneurs, you may have initially bootstrapped your startup by buying some stuff on your credit card. You were excited and apprehensive: Excited because now you had the cash to invest in your business, apprehensive because you had just taken on a debt you would have to repay.

But that was okay, because you were confident you could create more value than the interest you would pay. Even though you eventually have to pay off a financial debt, gaining access to the right resources now often marks the difference between success and failure.

That’s true for financial debt – but it’s almost never true for culture debt. 

Culture debt happens when a business takes a shortcut and hires an employee with, say, the “right” the skills or experience… but who doesn't fit the culture. Just one bad hire can create a wave of negativity that washes over every other employee, present and future – and as a result, your entire business.

Unfortunately the interest on culture debt is extremely high: In some cases you will never pay off the debt you incur, even when a culture misfit is let go or leaves.

Here are five all-too-common ways you can create culture debt that can keep your startup from achieving its potential:

1. You see the ivy and miss the poison

The star developer who writes great code… but who also resists taking any direction and refuses to help others… won't instantly turn over a new interpersonal leaf just because you hire him.

The skilled salesperson who in the short-term always seems to outperform her peers… but who also maneuvers and manipulates and builds kerosene-soaked bridges just waiting to go up in flames… won’t turn into a relationship building, long-term focused ambassador for your company just because you hire her.

The interview process is a little like a honeymoon. You see the best the candidate has to offer. If a prospective employee doesn't look like a great fit for your culture before he is hired, he definitely won’t be after he’s hired.

Never risk making a deal with the culture-fit devil. The soul of your company is at stake. Seriously.

2. You discard the attitude and play the skill card

Skills and experience are worthless when not put to use. Knowledge is useless when not shared with others.

The smaller your company the more likely you are to be an expert in your field, so transferring those skills to new employees is relatively easy. But you can't train enthusiasm, a solid work ethic, and great interpersonal skills – and those traits can matter a lot more than any skills a candidate brings.

According to this study only 11% of the new hires that failed in the first 18 months failed due to deficiencies in technical skills. The majority failed due to lack of motivation, an unwillingness to be coached, or problems with temperament and emotional intelligence.

Think of it this way: The candidate who lacks certain hard skills might be a cause for concern, but the candidate who lacks the beliefs and values you need is a giant culture debt red flag.

3. You try to sell a used car

It’s tempting to over-sell a candidate on your company, especially when you desperately need to fill an open position and you've been recruiting for seemingly forever.

Don’t sell too hard. Great candidates come prepared. They've done their homework. They already know whether your company is a good fit for them based on what they've read about you online. The really great recruits might have been stalking your company for many weeks or months -- seeing what the company feels like.

Describe the position, describe your company, answer every question, be candid and forthright, let your natural enthusiasm show through… and let the candidate make an informed decision. But, don’t oversell.

The right candidates recognize the right opportunities – and the right cultural fit. If you have to try too hard to convince someone, and the love is unidirectional, it's not setup for long-term success.

4. You mistake the rumblings for hunger

Nothing beats a formal, thorough, comprehensive hiring process… except, sometimes, a dose of intuition and gut feel.

At my company HubSpot (grew from 0-500 employees in 6 years) there are five key attributes we value:

· Humble. They’re modest despite being awesome. They’re self-aware and respectful.

· Effective. They get (stuff) done. They measurably move the needle and immeasurably add value.

· Adaptable. They’re constantly changing, life-long learners.

· Remarkable. They have a super-power that makes them stand out: Remarkably smart, remarkably creative, remarkably resourceful…

· Transparent. They’re open and honest with others – and with themselves.

In short, we look for people with H-E-A-R-T, because they help us create a company we love. So we always weigh our impressions against more qualitative considerations. You should too. Think of it this way: The more experience you have – the more lumps you’ve taken and hard knocks you’ve received and mistakes you’ve made – the more “educated” your “gut.” While you should never go on intuition alone, if you have a funny feeling about a candidate… see that as a sign you need to look more closely.

And look more closely.

For a detailed insider’s peek into how we think about culture at HubSpot, check out our Culture Code slides (embedded below for your convenience).

Bottom line: Define the intangibles you want in your employees and never compromise by hiring a candidate who lacks those qualities.

5. You decide to double down

There are two basic kinds of risk you can take on a potential employee.

First the worthwhile risks: Taking a shot on a candidate you feel has more potential than her previous employer let her show; taking a shot on a candidate who is missing a few skills but has attitude in abundance; taking a chance on a candidate you feel certain brings the enthusiasm, drive, and spirit your team desperately needs. Those are good chances to take.

Now the foolish risks: Taking a shot on a candidate with a history of performance issues that you hope will somehow develop a strong work ethic; taking a chance on the candidate who left his last two jobs because "my bosses were jerks;" taking a shot on the candidate who has no experience yet only wants to talk about how quickly and often she will be promoted.

Why do you rationalize taking foolish risks? You're desperate. Or you're lazy. Or you have "other issues to focus on." Or you figure your culture is strong enough to withstand the impact of one ill-fitting employee.

Don't take foolish risks. They almost always turn out badly. Occasionally take potentially worthwhile risks, because they can turn out to be your most inspired hires and, eventually, your best employees.

And never, ever take a chance that creates high-interest culture debt.

The cost to your organization is just too high. And, life is short.

A variation of this article was also posted as part of my participation in the LinkedIn Influencers program. 

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The 4 Personality Types Every Startup Needs

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Fri, Feb 01, 2013

Anyone can have a killer startup idea, but in order to make that idea succeed you’ll need an unbeatable team. Crafting the perfect team is an art -- one we're constantly trying to refine at my startup, Boundless.

We’ve found that a structured process yields the best new hires. This starts with first understanding the skills we need to fill. But we don’t just try to fit anyone with the right experience into a role - we go further and search for the right personality for the position as well. Throughout the entire hiring process, we’re constantly looking for signs of the four most important startup personalities: The Beast, Lara Croft, The Architect, and The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Our initial process is probably quite similar to many other startups. First, Boundless job candidates need to have a presence online. If we can’t find you online, you don’t exist, which means we’re not going to start the interview process. Next, candidates go through a phone screen to determine basic experience and qualifications. Those that survive the phone call visit with multiple team members on-site, where they’re assessed on skill and personality.

However, the final step is a little different. Before securing a job at Boundless everyone gives a 20 minute presentation on your personal or professional passion. We like to give the entire team a chance to see the candidate, and give the candidate an opportunity to impress the team with anything they want. We’ve seen people present on Tai Chi, cupcakes, coffee, how to build an art collection on a budget - all kinds of interesting, quirky and funny topics. And, of course, by this point in the process we have a strong idea of the type of a person the candidate is.

The Four Critical Startup Personality Types

The Beast, Lara Croft, The Architect, and The Most Interesting Man in the World. When filling a role at your startup, you need to find a candidate that embodies characteristics from each of these personalities if you are going to create a culture that changes the world. I firmly believe that a large part of my company’s success is driven by employees with characteristics strongly matching these personalities.

Here’s how to identify these four startup personalities:

The Beast

The startup Beast, modeled after the X-men character, possesses a “get shit done” mentality. A Beast’s raw animal output ensures they get more done in a day than even the most caffeinated worker bee. These people strive to be the very best in their profession, and doing more than seems humanly possible helps them get there. Look for people with high levels of productivity at their last positions and ridiculous amounts of drive and energy.

Lara Croft

When hiring, look for adventurers with an entrepreneurial spirit. These Lara Croft types create goals and projects for themselves to enhance the company values or goals. People who are self starters, self motivated, who have built things on their own time to scratch their own itch are Croft. Their adventurous minds dream big to help inspire the team.

The Architect

The Architect, inspired by the character from The Matrix, understands the big picture and can still focus on the details. These are the people who have a productivity hack for nearly all aspects of their life. Being productive and organized with the details helps The Architect keep the big picture in mind. You can spot Architects as people who have taken pride in a craft or know the intricate details of their previous position plus can clearly articulate the high-level strategy.

The Most Interesting Man in the World

At any fast-growing startup, you’ll spend a lot of time collaborating and hanging out with your colleagues. To make your office lunches or happy hours more enjoyable for all involved, hire people with character and charm for your team. The Most Interesting Man in the World, seen in the Dos Equis commercials, adds depth to your company culture. And in tough times, the Interesting Man (or woman) is the person you want fighting on your team and who help keep you going during the tough time. Don’t just look for goofballs - find people who have overcome difficult challenges and kept a positive attitude.

By hiring based on these four personalities, Boundless has built a team that not only has the capacity to build the best learning platform possible, but a team that continues to attract other top-notch people to share the journey with us.

We recently had the pleasure of welcoming Healy Jones to Boundless as our new Vice President of Marketing. The Beast in Healy helped our open textbooks initiative get written up in TechCrunch, and his wine tasting team presentation won him a nod in the Most Interesting Man in the World category. He joins Boundless from OfficeDrop where he was VP of Marketing, where he helped grow the user base 120 times in two years.

Whether you’re hiring a new team member as a VP or entry-level, remember that killer personalities help make the journey from idea to strong startup possible.

This is a guest post from Ariel Diaz. Ariel is the CEO and co-founder of Boundless, which creates free textbooks for college students.  

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Recruiting Developers? Create An Awesome Candidate Experience

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Thu, Nov 29, 2012

tl;dr:  If you're trying to attract awesome developers, you need to create an awesome candidate experience (CX).  Something that makes them go "WOW!".  It's like UX -- but for the people interviewing to join your team.  

It seems that every startup I know out there is trying to grow their development team.  But given that there are always a hundred things going on, few startups spend the time thinking about their interviewing process (because we're all busy building products and delighting users).

Yesterday, I sat in a HubSpot "Tech Talk". The topic was "Technical Interviews".  The idea was to share ideas and best practices across the product team so that we can better find and recruit great developers for the team.   HubSpot has had a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to technical recruiting.  We're fortunate to have Paul English, founder/CTO as a friend (he's hands down the best recruiter I've ever met).  Paul was kind enough to be "CTO for a day" at HubSpot.  And, because Google Ventures is an investor, we've been able to have a Googler from their recruiting team spend a few hours with us, reviewing our practices and giving us tips for how we can improve them.  

Ideas for Creating An Awesome Candidate Experience (CX)

Here are some ideas for what I think would make a great candidate experience.  Many of these ideas are implemented at HubSpot -- and I'm hoping the others will get adopted too.  We have some work to do ourselves, but we're passionate about building an amazing product team in Boston.

1. Decide to do it.  The first step in creating a great candidate experience (CX) is deciding that it's important.  Just like you'd commit time and energy for creating a great UX for your product, you need to devote some calories to iterating on your CX and working had to make it exceptional.  There are a number of reasons you should do this:

a) Recruiting great people is hard -- and competitive.  All things being equal, on average, if you can make the candidate experience better, you win.  People will often take positions with lesser known companies simply because they had a great interviewing experience.

2. Focus on the entire experience.  Designing a great candidate experience is not just about doing interviews well.  A great CX starts from the moment a person connects with your company (like your website) all the way through the point that they are delivered a decision -- and every step in between.

3. Measure it to improve it.  It's not possible to create a great CX without getting feedback from candidates.  What I'd suggest is a simple NPS (Net Promoter Score) style survey at the end of the candidate interviewing process.  The survey asks exactly two questions:

a) On a scale of 0-10 how likely are you to recommend that a friend or family member interview here?

b) Why did you give us that score?

You don't have to use these specific questions -- the benefit is that NPS is that it is simple, and widely used as a way to measure customer satisfaction (or more accurately, customer delightion).   We use NPS in a variety of ways at HubSpot -- including measuring the happiness of our customers and team members.

Some quick notes on collecting this feedback:  First, It should be collected before a final decision is delivered, so you get unbiased data.  Second, it should be made clear to the candidate that they are doing you a favor.  There's no harm in telling a candidate exactly why you're asking for this feedback.  In almost all cases, the candidate would likely see this as a positive signal.  It shows that you care.

4. Interviews are both a buying and selling process.  One of the mistakes inexperienced interviewers often make is behaving as if their job is only to "be convinced" by the candidate that they'd make a good hire.  As a result, they often have an "edge", aren't particularly friendly, and don't do enough to make the candidate feeel comfortable.   That can be a bit disconcerting for the candidate, and creates a sub-optimal candidate experience.  As an interviewer, your job is two-fold:  One, make a rational judgment as to whether you think this person would be a good hire for the team.  Two, ensure that the candidate wants to work at your company.  It's both a buying and a selling process (not just buying).  As it turns out, great people always have options.  Even if they're not a good fit and you decide not to hire -- you want them to leave with as positive an impression as possible.  They may have friends or family that are better fits.  Quick mental hack:  Pretend like every candidate you don't hire is going to become a future potential user/customer.  

5. Be at least a bit organized.  Yes, you're a startup.  Yes, everyone's already working away furiously and interviews are often an unwelcome irritant.  But, that's our problem -- not the candidate's problem.  Spend some time devising at least a simple process to ensure that meetings are scheduled appropriately, the candidate knows what the process is (and how long they'll need to be there) and always, always, always make sure they're feeling comfortable and welcome.  

6. Make speed a feature.  Just like great UX, a great CX is about speed.  Faster is always better.  I've never met someone that thought:  "Boy, am I glad those folks took 2 weeks to get back to me on an answer...".  

7. Have a "guest" tablet available for candidates.  Make sure it's already on your WiFi network, the home page in the browser is your company website.  The idea is to give the candidates something productive to occupy their time with while they're waiting.  They can even play Angry Birds, if they want.  Nothing's worse than sitting in reception, not knowing what the guest WiFi password is, and having to twiddle one's thumbs before an interview.

8. Don't repeat the same topics.  Be organized enough that if the candidate is going to go through multiple interviews, you don't have them cover the same topics multiple times.  That's annoying and a waste of time.  If one interview focuses on their front-end development skills and how well they really understand jQuery, then perhaps the other interview should be more about work style and thoughts on team collaboration.

9. Have a clear feedback/rating system.   You need to have a clear internal rating system so that interviewers can express their overall take.  If the person is an absolute no-hire, that should be clear.  So, your scale could be:  absolutely no hire, leaning against, neutral, leaning in favor, absolutely hire them.  One important point while we're on this topic:  The rating scale is not about the person -- it's about whether this person should be made an offer at this point in time.  I've sometimes seen people give a "high" rating (because the person was really, really good -- and interviewed really well), but then later heard "but I wouldn't hire them."  The reason for the interviews is to make a hiring decision.  Said differently, the ultimate return value of the function is a boolean hire/no-hire NOT awesome/good/not-so-good person.

10. Learn something.  Make every effort to learn something from every candidate.  Just because you're on this side of the hiring table and just because you may be more experienced does not mean you can't learn something from every candidate.  You can. Try to draw out a particular passion that the candidate has.  Perhaps a recent epic debugging victory.  Or, why their editor is the One True Editor To Rule Them All.  Doesn't matter what the topic.  Find what they're passionate about, and genuinely get them to teach you something about it.  (If they're not passionate about anything, you've got a problem).

11. Teach something.  Whether the candidate gets an offer or not, they should have learned something from you.  They need to walk out smarter than they walked in.  (Note: This does not mean you spend 50% of the interview telling them about the proper Pythonic way to do something). 

12. Be transparent.  Make the conversation open.  Let the candidate ask questions that are on their mind.  It could be about team dynamics, work style/hours, financials (growth, cash, etc.), product strategy, dev philosophy, whatever.  Be honest.  If there are some things you can't answer, be honest about that.  But, try to be as transparent as possible -- it makes for a much better candidate experience.

13. No leading of the witnesses.  If you're having multiple people interview a candidate, you need to make sure that the early interviewer(s) don't unduly influence the later ones.  This is important for a couple of reasons:  One, you want multiple viewpoints, not the same viewpoint multiple times.  Second, from the candidate's perspective, if they feel like they got off on the wrong foot in the first interview, you want them to have a reasonable chance of showing off their awesomeness in the subsequent interviews.  

Warning: Controversial Idea coming up:  One of the top areas of debate regarding technical interviewing is wheter you should "fail fast" (or not).  Let me set this up with an example:  Lets say you invite a candidate in for 4 hours for a series of interviews.  Lets say after the first interview, the interviewer is absolutely sure that this candidate is a "no hire".  What do you do? 

a) Thank them for their time and stop the interview process?  The advantage is that you're not expending further (very precious) developer time, when a decision is already made.  The downside is that this is kind of disheartening and deflating for the candidate.  If they were scheduled for 4 hours and you send them home after the first hour, that just doesn't feel good.

b) Continue the interview process?  The advantage is that it's (arguably) a better candidate experience.  You might even suggest that the later interviewers might like the candidate so much that they convince the first interviewer to change their mind.  

My general leaning is not completely cut-off the interview process.  Having said that, there are a few things I'd try:  

i) One, when inviting candidates in, make it a time range instead of an absolute number of hours.  Example:  Please schedule 3-4 hours for your visit.  That way, you could reasonably end the interviews without going through the full "maximum" time.

 ii) Build a reputation for being super-selective, but fair.  Be honest and open about this in the early conversations.  

iii) Consider offering a $100 Amazon gift card for "early exits".  Be transparent and honest.  "I just don't think we have a good fit here and doesn't make sense to put you through more interviews."  UPDATE: I reconsidered this one.  The more I thought about it, the cheesier it sounded.  

14. Get them to code, but let them pick the language.  Coding exercises are a critical part of the interviewing prcoess.  There is no substitute for getting a candidate to do a quick coding exercise (either on a computer or on a whiteboard).  The intent for this exercise is not to test proficiency with a particular language -- but to see if they can "think in code" -- and how they go about doing it.  My advice is to let the candidate pick whatever language they're comfortable with (amongst the mainstream languages available, like Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Javascript, etc.).  Any of these mainstream languages are more than powerful enough for a coding exercise, and even if you're not completely proficient in a langauge, you'll still get a sense for how the person goes about thinking about a problem and manifesting a solution in code. 

15. Do a friendly follow-up after the offer.  Generally, you'll have someone extend the offer in some formal or semi-formal form.  In addition to that, have one of the designated interviewers follow-up with a quick email (perhaps with a "cc" to the others they met).  Something like:  "Hey, thanks for vistiing HubSpot.  We'd be thrilled to have you join our merry band.  If you ever want to grab coffee or a bite to eat, just drop me a note.  I should probably tear myself away from the computer every now and then anyways..."

What's Your Take?

Whew!  That was a much longer article than I originally intended.  Now, it's your turn.  What do you think would make a great candidate experience?  Any tips or lessons learned from your own experience you'd be willing to share? Please put them in the comments.

<blatant_self_promotion>

Oh, and by the way, if you're an awesome developer (or know one) in the Boston area, you should know about the Boston Battle for recruiting great talent.  Hint:  There's potentially $10,000 cash in it for you.  Why not take HubSpot's own Candidate Experience for a spin?  I promise you won't regret it.  If you're awesome, you can email me directly (dharmesh @ hubspot dot-com), with a link to some evidence of your awesomeness.

</blatant_self_promotion>

Look forward to reading your comments and feedback.  As added incentive, if you share something that the community finds particularly insightful or useful, will send you a $25 Amazon certificate.  No limit to the number of "winners".  Ready?  GO!

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How To Hire Hackers: A Realistic Guide For Startups

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Thu, Nov 15, 2012

The following is a guest post by Iris Shoor. She's a co-founder at Takipi, a new startup looking to change the way developers work in the cloud. Previously, she was co-founder at VisualTao, a B2B startup acquired by Autodesk.

Call them hackers, ‘ninjas’, or ‘rock stars’ if you’d like. Other than being very talented developers, they all share one thing in common -- it’s unbelievably hard to bring them on-board your company. And as if competing with other companies for the same talent was not enough, being a startup just adds more challenges to the equation. Your startup may be the next Google/Facebook/Instagram, but until then - how can you convince the best developers out there to join a company where the CEO’s office is an IKEA desk? Here’s one answer -- recruit like a startup, in a creative and agile way, doing things the way big companies can’t. During the last 5 years I’ve interviewed over 250 candidates and recruited dozens of great engineers. The first interviews took place in our tiny office’s kitchen, and we still managed to convince some of the best candidates to join. There aren’t any magic tricks involved, but here are some tips and methods which helped us get ninjas, rock stars and other highly talented people on-board.

You’re a startup -- have the founders make the first contact.

We lose many potential candidates even before the starting line - we fail to bring them over for a first interview. Some are already talking with too many companies, or decide after a brief visit to your web-site that your startup just isn’t their thing. That’s the point where you can make a difference. Our co-founders (including myself) are in charge of sending the first e-mail to potential candidates. We’ve kept this habit even as we’ve grown. At first, I was worried some candidates may think we have too much free time on our hands (sadly, we don’t). I soon found out that when candidates receive a personal and flattering e-mail (important when it comes to star developers) from a co-founder, it sends a message that this startup is all about its employees. Here are some helpful points for writing the first email:

• Link to your online profile (personal blog, an interview with you, a YouTube video) when introducing yourself. Once there’s a face behind the email you’re more likely to get a positive response.
• Add a personal touch. Have other employees who went to the same college? Mention it. Grew up in the same town? Write it down. It might sound irrelevant, but it creates the first hook, enough to have them come over for a meeting.

Interviewing: It’s not just about the role, it’s also about who they will have lunch with.

While we tend to tell candidates everything about the role, the managers and the company, there’s one part that’s usually missing - who will they work with? One of the most common answers I get when asking people why they've chosen one job over the other is knowing other employees there. Let candidates know who'll be sitting next to their (IKEA) desk and sharing their 9GAG jokes.

• When candidates come for an interview we try to have them meet at least one future co-worker. A candidate asks a good tech question during the interview? Refer him to the engineer working on it instead of answering yourself. Found out the candidate has something in common with one of the employees (skydiving, growing up in Ohio, have a thing for ASCII art)? Introduce them. It’s not something we plan ahead, but given the opportunity, having the candidate stay at the office after the interview chatting with other employees, is considered a success.

• Don’t interview too early or too late during the day, when the office is empty. If the only time your future star can come in for an interview is 8:00am, make sure some people come early. You want to paint a full picture of what it will be like working at your startup.

[You don’t need a fancy office to make good impression - the small details do the job. Our entrance door has code on it and these are our meeting room custom coasters ]

 

Interviewing: Choose carefully which opportunity to pitch.

There truly are great things about joining a startup - new technological challenges, opportunities for moving up the ladder more quickly, learning about the business side of things, stock options and more. Don’t sell them all at once. Pitching becoming a manager to an engineer who just wants to experiment with new technologies? Bzzzz -- wrong move -- which might send her elsewhere.

• Look back - When we first started interviewing we used to ask candidates what they’re looking for. Instead of sharing their true motivations, they answered with what they thought was the ‘right’ answer -- “I just want to work on interesting stuff”. After a while we discovered the magic trick; instead of asking what they’re looking for now, we began asking how they've made previous job decisions. When asked about past decisions, people tend to share what really matters to them.

• Don’t pitch, give examples - You can’t really promise someone that he or she will become a manager in the future, or only work on interesting stuff. Instead, I tell candidates what talented people who've joined the company a year ago are doing now. This could be how an engineer with no previous management experience is already heading a small team, or how a developer straight out of college is doing such a great job we’ve put her in charge of some very key algorithms.

Signing: How to make candidates sign an employment agreement more quickly.

You've reached the homestretch. The candidate you really liked said yes, and now all is left is to sign the employment agreement. This can turn into a very risky period. The current employer is likely to come with a counter offer and so can other companies.

• Important: Avoid having your future star waste time on legal issues. To help with this we've decided to have the exact same employment agreement for everyone in the company. Other than the terms themselves, everything is the same - from the number of vacation days down to the small letters. It’s a super friendly agreement and we never change it. Once I tell candidates that everyone -- the CEO, the engineers and myself have all signed the exact same contract, and therefore we can’t change it, it usually takes them only a day or two to sign it. There’s much less need to re-read every part.

• Scott Weiss from A16Z shares a great tip about the pre-signing period with the ‘Welcome basket’.

 

How to hear ‘No” and how to say ‘No’

• Hearing No - Stay in touch with good candidates who chose a different company over yours. When a candidate I really like accepts a different offer over ours I always get the feeling I was dumped. True, I can’t honestly say I don’t understand how can someone pick a great job at Google over a small and unknown startup, but it still hurts. While the easiest thing to do after hearing a ‘No’ is, well, nothing, I try to make one last effort to stay in the picture. There are two main reasons for it : 1). Startups grow quickly. You might have a good candidate who decided a 10 employee company is not for him/her but a year or two later as your company grows it will become much more attractive. 2). Receiving a negative answer usually means you've reached second place. Sometimes, the first choice doesn't turn out to be the dream job they were hoping for. Some candidates don’t feel comfortable getting back in touch after they gave you a negative answer. By making the first move you’re saying that everything is fine and we’re still interested in you. Yes, it’s very much like dating. How to keep yourself in the picture? I like to send FB friend requests to candidates, and that’s something that you can do only as a startup (it can get pretty awkward when done by someone from a large company). Facebook is a great platform to share how well your startup is doing over the years. I also like sending an email once every 4-6 months, sharing how we’re doing and asking how’s everything going. I found out that most people find it friendly (and somehow flattering) rather than annoying.

• Saying No - giving a smart negative answer will help you reach other great engineers in the future. I often ask myself how I would have liked to receive a “No”. My answer is that I would like to hear the truth. Instead of using the default answer of “we've decided to continue the process with someone else”, I write the (sometime hard) truth- “You didn't pass the technical test’, ‘you don’t seem like a startup kind of guy’, ‘it seems like you’re more interested in managing and that’s something we can’t offer right now’. I also make sure to write some of the things I liked about the candidate. True, there are some cases you can’t write the real reason, but in most cases you can. I was terrified when I sent the first 100% sincere email, but I soon found out that candidates embrace this, and usually agree with the reason. Now comes the interesting part - instead of feeling rejected, most people rightly feel they interviewed for the wrong role. Once you don’t ‘break-up’ with them, you can ask them to recommend friends or co-workers they think could fit the position. Yep, it sounds crazy, but it’s true. Even if you don’t get a new lead, rest assured you’ll have a past candidate saying good things about your company, and that’s something great in itself.

How about you? Any lessons you've learned while trying to hire great developers for your team? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, Aug 06, 2012

1. Cost- Starting salaries for senior developers have skyrocketed in the past few years. The average starting salary for a senior Ruby developer has climbed to $94,000 ($107,000 in Silicon Valley). Compare that with the average salary for a junior Ruby developer, $70,000, ($80,000 in Silicone Valley). At that rate, you can give a junior developer a 10% raise every year for 3 years at the end of which you'd have an experienced senior employee who's been with you that long and is still costing less than a new senior hire.

2. Attitude- Anyone that gets courted the way a senior engineer does today is at risk of developing a sense of entitlement (to put it lightly). When I hired 'rockstars' at Designer Pages, the requests became increasingly ludicrous. Senior engineers had four-day weeks, required conference budgets, and refused to adhere to the language and technology standards the company had established. They always knew best and felt that we were lucky to have them. Junior devs on the other hand, are hungry. They want to prove themselves and are eager to learn. And assuming you're fostering the right culture, are excited to be part of your team.

3. Turnover- High turnover is the easiest way to kill a product. In The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks discusses problems inherent in a system designed by a succession of leaders, each with his own style and ideas: "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas."

Great companies need great engineers who want to solve complex problems. But the majority of work being done on a typical web application does not require a team full of PhD's with 10 years experience, making it no surprise that senior engineers quickly get bored and seek out other opportunities. By hiring junior developers and ensuring they're getting the continual training and development that they need, you can ensure that they stay engaged and derive as much personal and professional value out of your company as your company derives from them.

4. Culture- A prerequisite for being a great programmer is a love of learning. Unfortunately, many senior engineers come with a lot of baggage; they want to work on specific problems, in specific languages, and have little patience for the inexperienced n00b. By hiring junior engineers, and giving them the training and development they need to flourish, not only can you align everyone's technical styles under a cohesive vision, you can more easily create a culture wherein it is expected for the senior employees to mentor and coach new hires, just as they were coached when they first started.

1 - Deploy on Day One- Making engineers deploy code on their first day is the single best way to get them feeling great about their ability to acclimate and impact change in your organization. Companies like Etsy actually have a hard-and-fast rule that all engineers should deploy to production on day one.

2 - Assign Mentors- Lots of companies say they mentor their employees. I've found that unless this is systematized, senior employees get too busy to dedicate the necessary amount of time. Make sure every new hire has a mentor to pair with basically all-day for at least the first two weeks.

3 - Foster Productivity Early- The best way to sharpen a programmers skills is to write code. Junior engineers shouldn't be trying to learn legacy systems when they first arrive- let them work in as fresh a codebase as possible so they can get cranking right away.

4 - Invest in Training- Nothing will give you a better ROI on your time than making sure your employees are well trained. Create a learning plan for each hire for the first 3-6 months, complete with recommended reading, that applies to the projects they are working on.

5 - Be patient. :)

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Startup Lessons From 17 Hard-Hitting Quotes In "Moneyball"

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Thu, Feb 02, 2012

I'm an idiot. Not all of the time, mind you, not even most of the time, but every now and then, I'm an idiot. Like the time my friend and co-founder Brian Halligan asked me to read the book “Moneyball”. This was back when we had first launched our startup, HubSpot. “But, I'm not a baseball guy,” I said. “It's not about baseball. It's about data.” And, I put it on my reading list, and then still failed to read it. I even bought the book, but still failed to read it That was a mistake. 

I just got done watching the movie “Moneyball” for the second time. The first time I watched it was last night. It's the only time I've watched the same movie twice in two days. It's not just because it was a great movie (it was), but because I felt I missed so much the first time, that I had to watch it a second. If you haven't seen the movie yet, you should stop reading this article and go watch it. If you get distracted and never make it back to this article, I forgive you.

So, without further ado, here are some great quotes from Moneyball

Brilliant Startup Lessons From Moneyball

1. He passes the eye candy test. He's got the looks, he's great at playing the part.

Spectacular startup success often becomes a game about scouting and recruiting. A common mistake entrepreneurs make is recruiting team members early on simply because they look the part. In the long run, it doesn't matter if on paper, someone's perfect. You want people that can actually do the job. That VP of Sales candidate that has 15 years of experience at Oracle? Likely not worth it for you. They'll look the part, but they're not guaranteed to be able to actually do the job. And, like Johnny Damon, they're going to be expensive. Get good at seeing talent where others don't.

For example, at HubSpot, most of the early team did not look good on paper at all.  Most of us had little or no prior background doing what we were setting out to do.  

2. You're not solving the problem. You're not even looking at the problem.

Identify a fundamental problem and then focus, focus, focus on solving that problem. Don't get distracted by all the the things that are swirling around the actual problem. Don't listen too closely to those that have deep industry expertise and are emotionally attached to the status quo — it's possible that they're part of the problem. Figure out what the actual issue is, and solve it.

For example, look at Dropbox.  Drew set out to solve a really hard problem -- getting data to synch across different devices.  He had many people (including me) that were telling him that this particular idea had been pursued so many times before.  He didn't get distracted by all that noise.  He dug in and fixed the problem.  Today, Dropbox is valued at billions of dollars and has millions of happy users.

3. We've got to think differently.

Reminds me of Apple. Only, Steve Jobs wrote it as ”think different” (intentionally going with the grammatically incorrect version because it “sounded better”).  Like the Oakland As, your startup too is working under constraints.  Often, big constraints.  Often, unfair constraints.  If you're trying to disrupt the status quo and beat competitors that are much bigger and better funded, you're not going to do it by playing their game.  You'll need to think differently.  Playing the old way when you're at a disadvantage is a sure-fire way to lose.

This is one that I'm personally very passionate about.  When we started HubSpot, everything we had learned about startups -- and the convention wisdom was "do one thing, and do it very, very well."  Generally, that's really, really good advice.  Except when it's not.  Like in our case.  The problem we saw was not that there weren't great marketing apps out there -- the problem was that none of it was integrated or worked well together.  So, we thought different.  We decided to do the crazy, crazy thing of doing it all.  Why?  Because that's what we believed the problem was.

4. First job in baseball? It's my first job anywhere.

Experience is often over-rated. Some of the most successful startup teams consisted of people that lacked relevant experience at the time they joined. But, what they lacked in experience, they more than made up for in sheer talent and hunger. In the early days, hire athletes. People with raw talent and a propensity to get things done. Don't be resistent to recruiting people that are early in their careers.  You're looking for arbitrage opportunities.  You're looking for the future stars -- because you likely can't afford or convince the current stars.  

5. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins.

I'm going to illustrate this point with a quick paraphrasing with a conversation I had with an entrepreneur last year. It went roughly like this:

Me: What do you need?

Them: We need to build a management team.

Me: No, what do you actually need right now?

Them: Well, right now we need a VP Engineering.

Me. What for?

Them: Well, we need head up our product development effort.

Me. No, you actually need to write code and release a product. You need to respond to customer issues. You need to iterate quickly so you can learn quickly. You don't need a VP of anything, you need a doer of stuff that needs to get done. Don't think about buying titles — think about buying outcomes.  Think about plugging gaping holes in the company.  Signing up customers so fast that you can't respond to all the support emails?  Don't hire a head of support, hire someone that helps you tackle the support issue.  Someone that's maniacally committed to customer happiness.  They can become your head of support some day.

6. He really needs to accept this as life's first occupation, a first career.

This statement was made to the young Billy Beane when he was trying to decide between the full scholarship to Stanford and a career in Major League Baseball. Billy's mom asked if he could do both. The answer was, he couldn't. And, that's true in baseball, in startups and just about any hyper-competitive activity. You can't straddle the fence, because you will get your ass kicked by someone who's almost as good as you, but much more committed. You can't take that investment banking job and do a startup. You can't maintain two feet firmly planted on the ground and take the leap of faith. You have to pick. It's not an easy choice, but you have to pick. And, if you're in school, my personal (and unpopular in some startup circles) advice is stay in school . Make learning and building connections your “first occupation”.

But whatever you do, don't sit on the fence.  Commit to something.  Don't hedge.  Give it all you have.  Make it your life's first occupation.  If you can't get excited about it -- find something else.  I've made lots of stupid mistakes in my professional career -- the stupidest was trying to run two startups at the same time.  That's a story for another day.  I'm going to close with a quote from my co-founder at the first startup: "If you sit on the fence too long, your genitals are going to hurt."

7. Why do you like him? Because he gets on base.

The startup world is filled with superstars that get overlooked or don't quite make it because they're "quirky" or otherwise don't fit preconceived patterns of what you think a person in a given role should look and feel like.  None of that matters.  When recruiting engineers, find brilliant people that write code that solves the problem simply, effectively and can be maintained without brain damage.  When hiring sales people find those that have high emotional IQ and care about truly understanding customer problems -- and selling them a solution.  Figure out what success looks like for a given role, and ignore the irrelevant details.  (Note:  Culture fit is not an irrelevant detail.  Things that are irrelevant are age, nationality, gender, etc. -- things that have no bearing on the outcome).

10. Hey, anything worth doing is hard. And we're gonna teach you.

Your ability to teach is one of the single biggest levers you have in a startup.  Why?  First, because it's one of the biggest benefits you can deliver to your team members.  They can get a higher salary somewhere else.  They can get better perks somewhere else.  But, at your startup, they can learn things.  Second, it's unlikely you're going to find the "perfect" 5-tool player.  Even if you found them, you likely couldn't afford them.  If you're willing to help people with a specific super-power fill in gaps in their knowledge/experience, you create lots of value.

12. It's day one of the first week. You can't judge just yet.

Be a little bit patient.  Often, your best people will take a little time to really shine.  Don't judge too early. Determine the context.  If someone's not cranking yet, is it because getting up to speed is hard?  Everyone's too busy to show them ropes? Their lack of early performance could be the context, so be patient

But, don't be too patient.  If someone isn't at least moderately productive in the first month or two, it's unlikely they're going to be super-productive in the following year.  The really great people tend to deliver some value almost immediately.

14. Where on the field is the dollar I'm paying for soda?

It is good to be budget-conscious in an early-stage company.  Instills the right kind of discipline that will help long-term.  But, don't be a penny wise and a pound foolish.  There are little things that don't cost that much, that makes people happier.  It's not about the money (they can all afford the soda), it's about the inconvenience and the principle.  Remember, deep down inside, people are human.  [smile] 

One quick example from HubSpot:  We launched a book program whereby any employee can request any book they think makes them a better HubSpotter.  I personally handle all requests and send out a Kindle version of the book immediately.  It's not that expensive, but it's been super-well received.  

15. These are hard rules to explain to people. Why is that a problem, Pete?

One of the best segments in the movie.  Pete is troubled at how different what they're doing is, and why it's hard to get others to understand and accept it.  But, the point was, when you're transforming something and making massive change, not everyone is going to understand.  The important thing is to be right -- and then make the change happen.  The best way to convince people that your theory was right is to be right and show them (not tell them) you're right.  Most people will never be convinced otherwise.

16. I'm not paying you for the player you used to be, I'm paying you for the player you are right now.

Hard-hitting advice.  I'd extend this to say:  Recruit on potential but reward on performance.  Customers are not going to be delighted by the code a brilliant engineer could have written.  On a related note is the quote "If he's a good hitter, why doesn't he hit good?" Or, "If she's such a good sales person, why can't she sell?"

17. We're going to change the game.

And really, that's what it's all about.  It's not about exiting for millions of dollars or going public.  It's about changing the game.  It's about seeing something that's not quite right in the world, and deciding you want to fix it.  For me, personally, it was observing that marketing is broken.  Most people hate marketing.  we want to transform marketing into something people love.  It's hugely ambitious, but I have this feeling, deep-down inside, that we're right.

How about you?  What is the flaw (big or small) that you're seeing in the universe that you're trying to fix?  Any favorite lines from Moneyball that you'd like to share?

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HubSpot Fires First Shot in Boston Battle For Talent: $10,000 Bounty

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, Jan 24, 2011

Over on the west coast, companies like Google and Facebook are duking it out for top tech talent.  There’s all sorts of craziness going on including 10% across the board raises and big bonuses. Back here in Boston, there’s a similar battle for talent brewing.  Except, here in Boston, we’re kind of polite and a tad overly sane (there’s not enough craziness).  So, nobody really comes right out and says that there’s a battle for tech talent going on in Boston.  So, I’m going to go ahead and say it.

There’s a battle for brilliant developers going on in Boston! 

There, I said it.  I feel much better now.  All anyone seems to talk about around here is startup funding and whether or not Boston VCs invest aggressively enough in consumer Internet companies.  But, I’m going to argue that for awesome startups, raising funding is actually easier these days than recruiting great developers.  I personally know a dozen startups in the Boston area that are all looking for great developers (I’m an angel investor in half of them).

So, who wins in the battle for tech talent?  Why, it’s the talent!  Why?  Because as in most situations where demand greatly exceeds supply, it’s a seller’s market.  (That’s an MBA way of saying, “you’re going to do really well….”)  So, instead of startups interviewing developers, in reality, it’s more that developers are interviewing startups.  Life is good for you, esteemed awesome developers!

We’re working on making HubSpot a magnet for technology talent in the Boston area, like Facebook is on the west coast.  We’ve got tough software problems to solve, millions of users, lots of capital, cool office space, and some of the smartest developers around. 

In order to officially kick off the Boston battle for talent, we’re doing a few somewhat crazy things (crazy for Boston, at least). Here’s what we’ve got lined up so far:

a) Refer A Developer, Make $10,000.  If you know a brilliant developer, refer them to HubSpot.  Not only will you be helping them join a great software company in Boston, you’ll get a $10,000 bonus for yourself.  Think of the gadgets you could buy!  Check out the “Refer A Developer” program.

b) Many Will Enter, Few Will Emerge — With A Free iPad.  Any developer that gets called in for the final HubSpot interview (you don’t even have to survive it, or be offered a job), gets a free iPad, just for playing.  Oh, and before you think we’re super-crazy, know that we are notoriously selective.  In fact, I’m not sure that if I weren’t the founder, I’d be able to make it that far.  Seriously.  Our dev team is super picky. 

c) $4,000 shopping spree.  Any developer that joins HubSpot gets to go on a $4,000 hardware/gadget shopping spree.  They get to pick out stuff that they can somewhat rationalize will make them more productive and/or happy.  Popular options include the new Macbook Air, a big second monitor and one of the cool new Android phones (which we hear, can actually make phone calls).    [Note to self:  Now that iPhone’s available on Verizon, probably need to stop making iPhone jokes].

So, the question is, is all this craziness diabolically clever or an act of desperation?  That depends.  The difference between crazy and genius is whether it works. 

Of course, we’ve been doing other things to build the awesome team we already have.  If the company sucked, no amount of recruitment shenanigans would work, so we first made sure not to suck. 

Here are some reasons why we think you (or someone you know) should check us out.

Reasons You Or Someone You Know Should Interview (At) HubSpot

1. A compelling vision that helps millions of people:  Great developers like building products with broad appeal and wide reach.  They like to have impact and influence.  We do that at HubSpot.  Our marketing software has been built for small businesses.  We’re rallying against old-school marketing like junk mail, spam and cold calls.  The message is resonating really well.  We reach millions of users every month, and have 4,000 customers.  With this kind of scale comes great challenges.  Like figuring out how to store and analyze terabytes of data (and heading towards petabytes alarmingly fast). Or, creating a user experience that your Uncle Leo could use (because someone’s Uncle Leo does). 

2. Shiny, Happy People:  Last year, we were voted one of the best companies to work for in the Boston area by the Boston Business Journal (our friends at Google were #2).  We asked people why the heck they were so happy (besides the spiked slushies), and they said, somewhat recursively, “…I’m happy because I get to work with other smart, happy, passionate people.”  We have the reverse Lake Wobegon effect.  Several times a week, you will walk into a room and feel you brought the average IQ down.  Seriously, you will. 

3. A Real Salary:  We’ve raised $33 million in venture capital from some of the best VCs on the planet.  We have millions still left in the bank and revenues are growing like wildfire.  So at HubSpot, you don’t have to be paid in hugs and options and work on the “deferred compensation plan” (which is basically, “we can’t really afford to pay you right now — but just as soon as we get those customers/investors/grandparents/governments to give us some cash, you’ll be first in line!”).  You actually get a real salary, making your friends and family proud and/or envious.  We’ve heard that money is useful for buying stuff.  So, come help us spend some of those venture capital dollars towards a good cause.

Note: I’m not suggesting that it’s not a good idea to work for an early-stage startup — they’re totally cool.  But if you do, it should either a) be your own and/or b) be one that you are totally passionate about.

4. Options/Equity:  Yep, we have those too.  Every developer at HubSpot gets a stake in our future.  The difference between options at HubSpot and most other startups, is that the share price has just kept going up and up and up.  And, we think our best years are still ahead of us.  It’s a bit like joining Facebook in the early years, only not. 

5. We don’t want to just build software, we want to build entrepreneurs:  We want to build a big, successful company in the Boston area.  Obviously, creating great software is a big part of that.  But, we’re also passionate about seeding the next generation of entrepreneurs.  If you have the entrepreneurial gene, we fully expect that you’ll meet and work with your future co-founders at HubSpot.  We also have one of the best startup networks imaginable. 

6. We’ll Raise Your Currency:  HubSpot has an exceptionally strong reputation.  We’re known for hiring kick-ass people and not suffering fools.  So, if for some silly reason, you decide to leave us someday, the fact that you’ve been on the HubSpot team is going to wonders for your credibility (not that you needed help on that front).

7. Strict “No Jerks” Rule:  We don’t hire jerks.  Period.  If your normal disposition is to be negative and cranky, and it can’t be explained by a temporary lack of caffeine, you won’t fit in at HubSpot.  We’re intense at HubSpot, but it’s a good intense.  The reason for the “no jerks” rule is simple — for those of us that are not jerks, working with jerks is a whole lot of suckiness.  Life is short.  Why work with jerks?

8. Cool Stuff Shopping Spree:  We got tired of arguing about whether this MacBook Pro or that Thinkpad was better.  Or whether big second monitors really did help productivity (they do).  So, every developer that joins HubSpot gets $4,000 to go buy stuff.  You decide what’s going to make you super-productive.  [Oh, and if you just happen to want to buy that latest Android tablet because you’re thinking about doing a side project some day, I say go for it.  ]

9. Office Space For Happy Humans:  The nice thing about having lots of customers and fast growing revenues is that we can afford to invest in great working conditions.  We work in a well lit, comfortable, fun, cool office space.  Don’t take our word for it, check out some photos, or just come visit [we have HubSpot.tv every Friday at 4pm — and there’s free beer]. 

10. Hyper Transparency:  One of the core components of HubSpot’s culture is hyper transparency.  Every employee in the company has access to most of the company’s critical data — including financials.  This includes customers, revenue, burn-rate, cash in the bank, valuation of last venture round, notes from “strategic” meetings, plans for future financing.  Just about everything.  Our default position is:  “Unless you have really good reason to keep it secret, don’t make it a secret.”  We trust ourselves to use all of this information wisely, and so our default mode is “open”.

11. The “Take What You Need” Vacation Policy:  Over a year ago, the topic of a vacation policy came up in a management meeting.  We didn’t have a policy, and someone suggested we should have one.  Our CEO pushed back, with a “why”?  Net result:  We decided our policy would be to have no policy.  Members of the team take as much vacation as they need.  There’s no approval, no paperwork, no tracking, no accruing — nothing.  Contrary to what some outsiders may have believed, the company did not die.  It’s working great. 

12. Friends In Cool Places:  We believe in being an active member of the startup community inside and outside of Boston.  As such, we're well connected with a bunch of startup celebrities: Drew Houston (DropBox) -- he's on our advisory board.  Jason Fried (37signals).  Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow), Mike McDerment (Freshbooks).  Adam Smith (ex-Xobni).  Alexis Ohanian (Y Combinator, Reddit) -- also on our advisory board.  Eric Ries (we're major lean startup fans). Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz, and SEO Extraordinaire). Hiten Shah (KissMetrics).  Dan Martell (Flowtown).    If that isn't enough name dropping for you, we've got more. So, what's the point of all of this (other than showing off)?  Well, we learn from all of these great entrepreneurs.  We hang out with them for beers.  They come do guest talks at HubSpot.  It's awesome.

13. Ping Pong:  Yes, we have a table, that’s not a big deal.  What we’re proud of is that our CEO, CTO, our VP Platform, VP Customer Happiness, VP Sales all play ping-pong.  Heck, even our CFO can play ping pong and chances are he can kick your ass. [Feel free to challenge him, but don't let him charge you for a beer -- they're free at HubSpot].

14. We're Good Peeps:  I know this one's a tad subjective, but ask around.  If you know anyone that knows HubSpot (and you should), ask them about the people.  Chances are they'll say good things. 

OK, I could drone on and on, but I think, you get the point.  We're a fun place to work, growing crazy fast and all modesty aside the place you want to be if you're awesome and can code.  You'll be the envy of your friends and family ("what, you got a job at HubSpot -- that's cool!"). 

I'll even make the initial process painless for you.  Just go to this page and enter your email address and a URL of some page that shows me your awesomeness.  I'll personally check you out and see if it's worth going to the next step.  If you ask me nicely, I'll even tell you what your odds are of making it to the final interview and getting the free iPad.

What do you think?  Any other ideas for attracting great developers?  Did you think this set of ideas was diabolically clever or a tad too desperate?  Would love to read your comments.

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Commit To Your Core: 9 Reasons Why Every Entrepreneur Should Outsource

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Thu, Dec 02, 2010

The following is a guest post by Scott Dinsmore.  Scott is an entrepreneur, Personal Freedom Coach and value investor. Read more of his articles at Reading For Your Success or grab his free eBook.

The day of the founder doing everything is dead. No one is really a salesperson, marketer, graphic designer, developer and customer service rep. As an entrepreneur you may do all these things, but that doesn't mean that's the smartest way to run your business.

Years ago Michael Gerber coined the the term E-Myth, referring to the entrepreneurial myth of people going into business to do what they love, only to realize that 80% of the business has nothing to do with their passion--but instead with building and running a company.

This often results in one of two outcomes: The founder hates his job or the business fails--usually the former follows the latter quite closely.

It shouldn't be this way and it doesn't have to be.

I’ve started two businesses in the past two years. Outsourcing made this possible. Without it I'd be nowhere. With it, I have two profitable ventures and the time to think and work on the projects that make the biggest difference in each of them.

Outsourcing has become a must. As a founder and entrepreneur, you can't afford not to. Here's why.

1. You need a prototype early. Scratching your idea on a cocktail napkin long after you should be at home is a start, but only a start. You need a prototype to sell your vision- to friends, investors, your future team and charter customers. Depending on your skill-set, you may need a designer, developer, artist or a kick-ass storyteller to get you a presentation-worthy prototype fast and on the cheap. Any of this can and should be outsourced .

2. You need to stay lean. As entrepreneurs we live and die by our burn rate. While you may need help with a website or prototype early on, you cannot hire someone fulltime from the start, especially before you've sorted out how you'll structure pay, stock options and the other headache-creating benefits. It's premature and expensive. You are likely still forming your crystal clear vision. You no doubt need help, but you may need very specialized help. That's what outsourcing is made for. Hire your generalists and outsource your specialists. Only pay for what you need, no matter what stage your business is in.

3. Test your team. Regardless of how much capital you have, no one can afford to hire a dud. Whether you outsource or not, starting out with a trial (via internship, project-based work or some sweet competition) is a must. You may be looking for a team in India or right down the street from you. You can screen by location (and a ton of other criteria) with the resources I mention below. Get clear on what you need and find the people who were made for the role. Let them know a full-time job is on the line. That'll get the healthy competition cooking. Hiring and firing is a pain in the ass (and expensive). Try before you buy, and avoid those duds.

4. Be forced to know what you want. Since outsourcing is project and skill set based, it forces an entrepreneur to do something most never fully do — define their vision and the actual tasks they need done to make it happen. Sure, these will change over time, but nothing is more frustrating than hiring someone (or being hired) when neither side has a clue what the target is. If you don't know the skills you need then how could you ever expect to hire the right person? Founders are notorious for loving the vision but avoiding the details. Force yourself to take your medicine.

5. Live and die by the 80/20 rule-Only do what you're best at. Say you started a business because you know AJAX, MySQL, PHP or some other technologies above most the world's head, and you are going to build a kick-ass web app with it. Then how much sense does it make for you to be burying yourself in PhotoShop trying to create a logo? None! You have super human strengths (we all do) and you know what they are. Things you feel you can do better than most anyone in the world. That is your personal edge. Leverage it as much as possible. This is your 20%. Focus all your attention on the 20% of your workday that truly moves the needle, based on your natural strengths, and outsource the rest. This might mean customer service, design, social media marketing or coding. It's your job to assess yourself and your team. If you aren't lights-out good at it, find someone else to do it. They'll do it better, in less time, and surely for less money.

6. You can't afford not to. Would you believe me if I told you I have a team in India who handles all my SEO/SEM, deep analytics, web research, graphics and coding for between $3-$5/hour? I do. Ravi leads the team. He has for three years. He's loyal, trustworthy, wicked smart and best of all, he works his ass off. These guys have college and advanced degrees and are happy to work for rates often between $5-$20/hour for just about any technical task you could imagine. But the real clincher is how hungry they are. Not only are they qualified to do the work, they will do it in half or a fourth the time. It's pure geo-arbitrage. The pay is great for them and the output is awesome for us. Does it get anymore win/win?

7. You are worth more than you think. If you're telling me you could do the stuff yourself for cheaper, remember the 80/20 rule. Just because you can do it yourself does not mean it makes any sense to do so. First off realize that as a sharp entrepreneur with fire in his belly, your time is worth a lot. I'd say $50/hr at the least. This may help make the decision. And don't forget about the opportunity cost. Your mind and time are your most valuable assets. Spend them wisely.

8. You can outsource anything. Literally anything...Over my past four years, I've outsourced more business jobs than I thought possible and more personal tasks than some would consider appropriate. The only limit is your creativity. Here's a taste of projects I've sent afar so I can focus on my core of writing, coaching, investing and business building:

• web research
• customer service
• accounting
• web and blog design
• blog and copy writing
• blog comment moderation
• locate best courses in your area for various subjects
• voice transcription
• SEO, SEM and Social Media Marketing
• personal or administrative tasks, travel plans
• locating the perfect gift on Valentine's Day (who said it has to be all business?)

For more ideas check out Elance's 100 Projects You Can Outsource.

9. It feels awesome to know someone's working as you sleep. No joke. Not only is it unbelievably efficient, but it's just plain fun to have all your tasks completed while your off dreaming (since some of the best outsourcers are found in India and other cheap foreign lands), leaving you ready to keep the ball rolling when you wake. And there you have it. The holy grail: You've found a way to work 24/7 without losing your life.

Where to outsource.

The list is endless but the below should be all you need. I've had personal experience with most of these.

• Elance- One stop shop for anything outsource
• V Worker (formerly Rent A Coder)- More technical focus
• Fiverr- Every job for five bucks, graphic design to grocery shopping
• Ask Sunday- Large team for any task under the sun
• Virtual Assistant Board- Job board for outsourcers and providers

You're a Founder, Now Start Thinking like a CEO.

What does a CEO actually do? They don't build products, they build businesses. They are nothing more than master outsourcers. Their expertise is having a vision and creating and motivating the right team of superb skill to make it reality. They don't bury themselves in a manual to learn Photo Shop to design their website. They find a designer so they can keep the train moving forward. There is no pride in doing everything yourself. If you expect to really be competitive, it's impossible. Spend your time on the work you know deep down only you can do. The work that will really change the world. Find someone else to do the rest and success starts to become a lot more realistic.

So, what do you think?  Have you tried outsourcing non-critical tasks that are not your superpower?  How did it go?  Would you do it again? Would love to hear your experiences and lessons learned in the comments.

One More Thing...A FREE Special Event And Gift To The OnStartups Community

====================
OnStartups is helping put on a free "virtual event" in conjunction with the PlusConf crew on December 7.  It starts at 12 pm EST, is 100% free, and all you need is a computer with an internet connection.  Speakers include some awesome Boston natives such as David Cancel of Performable and Todd Garland of BuySellAds.
OnStartups Presents PlusConf

Where: Anywhere in the world via your browser at http://www.plusconf.com

When: 12/7/2010 12:00 PM EST

More Info: 
Register For FREE At http://www.plusconf.com
Learn from the most successful web app founders and CEOs on what makes your startup tick.  

Speakers include:

Hiten Shah- CEO of KissMetrics

David Cancel- CEO of Performable

Todd Garland- CEO of BuySellAds

Noah Kagan- Co-Founder of AppSumo

Dan Martell- Co-Founder of FlowTown

Allan Branch- Co-Founder of LessEverything

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Startup Insights From Paul English, Co-Founder of Kayak

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, May 10, 2010

I’m just wrapping up several weeks of attending conferences across both coasts.  Of the ones I have been to recently, the Nantucket Conference has been my favorite.  A great group of people and a small enough gathering that you can actually get to know many/most of them.  My thanks to Scott Kirsner who organizes the conference and was kind enough to invite me to speak this year.

One of the sessions at the conference was an interview with Paul English, founder and CTO of Kayak.  The interview was conducted by Larry Bohn of General Catalyst (Larry also happens to be an investor in my startup, HubSpot and sits on our board of directors).  In case you are one of the few people that hasn’t heard of Kayak yet, it’s the most popular travel search site on the web (and one of the top 1,000 most popular sites on the web).  Kayak is great Boston-area success story.  One quick point on that:  In Dec 2007, with just 39 employees, Kayak raised $230 million (at a much higher than that valuation) to acquire their largest competitor, SideStep.  Paul is on my list of “best entrepreneurs I’ve met”.  Lots to learn from him.

The following are some notes I pulled from the interview.  I encourage you to listen to the entire session (high quality audio, and lasts about 45 minutes).  Just hit "play" on the widget below.  Or, if you’d prefer, you can read the entire transcript at the bottom of this post.

 

Or, you can download the MP3 directly

1. “I've started four or five companies now, based on how you count. There is one I am trying to forget.”  Most serial entrepreneurs that I know don’t have a 100% “hit rate”.  Just about everyone has had at least one venture that didn’t quite turn out the way they had hoped.  I like that Paul’s able

2. Like me, Paul also started a company with his brother.  I have to remember to chat with him about that over a beer someday.  [Note to self:  Write article titled “Starting Something With A Sibling: Understanding The Tradeoffs”.

3. Like many of my favorite software entrepreneurs, Paul’s a programmer by training.  Interesting side note:  In my recent travels and interactions with entrepreneurs, I’m finding that an increasing number of founders have a design/UI/UX background. 

4. When asked “Why do you start companies”, Paul has one of the best answers I’ve ever heard: I start companies because it gives me an opportunity to create teams. 

5. “Our priorities are always team first, customer second and profit third.”

6. The difference between an A team and an A+ team is the difference between a million in revenue and a billion in revenue.

7. Sometimes people Paul is interviewing say “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”.  Paul:  “Trust me, after a few months, you’ll learn that the reason you’re here is not me, but the people around you”

8. Paul English on recruiting (I’m paraphrasing this from a meeting I had with him and some pieces from this interview):  When someone mentions the name of a person that they’ve worked with that they think is exceptional, a little clock starts ticking in my head.  My world goes to black and white, and this clock is in color.   From when the clock starts, I give myself seven days to track them down, back channel, get them in for two series of interviews that are intense and focused, and make an offer and have them accept it. That's seven days from when I hear the person's name.  [`

9. At least one of the co-founders needs to be passionate about recruiting because that absolutely makes all the difference in the world.

10. When Paul started Kayak, one thing that was very important to him was building something that his friends could use.   Before Kaya, when people asked "What do you do?", his response was "I work in an operations research group at data general, and we're studying advanced processes for doing disc drive manufacturing."  Clearly, unlikely to be fascinating to most people.  With Kayak he wanted it to be different.  I have had almost precisely this experience.  For my current startup, I wanted to work on something that when random strangers asked me what I did, I wanted a decent chance that the answer would be relevant to them. 

11. “I had sold two companies. I didn't want to sell a company again. So my venture guys would sometimes say, "You know, explore it." And I'd have the meeting knowing in my mind that there is no way I am going to sell this company.”

12. When Paul was hiring his early team, he refused to hire people from the travel industry.  He didn’t want travel people, he wanted consumer product people. 

13. One of Paul’s investors said, “You’ll name this company Kayak over my dead body.”  Paul: “Thanks for the input.” 

14. The Red Phone:  Paul found the most obnoxious, loud-ringing red phone he could find and plugged it in right in the engineering office.  About 30% of the time, when a Kayak web visitor saw a support phone number on the website, it was the number of that phone. The idea was to build a culture that was centered around the customer. 

15. “I guess this is the first time I'm talking about this. But I'm at the beginning of a new project, which will be my next 10 year project. I'll be at Kayak, of course, pushing it, pushing it, but I'm starting a new project that has an audacious goal of creating free low-bandwidth Internet for the whole continent of Africa.  [This super-cool.]

16. In an uncharacteristic moment, I actually asked Paul a question in the session about how his advice around recruiting as a company grows from 5 to 50 to 500 people.  He had two points:  First, make sure you identify the stars.  He does this by asking people on his team who the brightest people they’ve worked with is.  Then, make sure that they know how much emphasis you put on the team and go after them — aggressively.

17. If you visit Kayak.com and hit the feedback button, you will get a response via email.  Kayak responds, individually, to every email.  That’s impressive.  What is crazy-impressive is that the email response comes from either Paul or someone on the engineering team.  He gets flack for using a $150k/engineer to answer support emails when the rest of the world is outsourcing it for $8/hour or something.  Why does he do this?  Because, when engineers respond to support issues, when the same issues arise time and time again, they are more likely to stop what they are doing and go fix the problem so that they don’t have to answer that same question again.  And, because it sends a message to the entire team that they take these issues very seriously.

Full Transcript of Paul English Interview

[applause 0:00:00]

Larry Bohn: [0:05] So let me begin this way. Paul and I have known each other for, I calculated, 23 years.

Paul English: [0:14] That sounds right. 1989.

Larry:[0:16] 1989. And we're sort of neighbors. And we've known each other through many different lives and journeys, the most recent of which is my firm, General Catalyst, is an early investor in Paul's company, KAYAK. [0:33] So we'll let other things come out during the dialogue, but I thought it would be great to get Paul here to talk about what he does, what his passions are, what his philosophy of building companies. I think many of you follow his blog or have heard him quoted about everything from customer service to how to manage development teams, as well as a lot of his interests in terms of helping out in the third world.

[0:59] So I have a bunch of questions that I probably won't get to ask, but we'll start, and then we'll open up to questions later from anyone in the audience. So first thing, why don't you give just a quick personal bio of how you got to where you are today in your professional life?

Paul:[1:16] It's all due to Larry; everything I learned working for Larry. So, I'm a Boston boy. Those of you who are not Bostonians will tell from my speech dysfunction. I have to speak very clearly so I don't sound too - to kind of hide the Boston accent a little bit. [1:36] I am a software engineer by training. I went to school UMass Boston. And I've started four or five companies now, based on how you count. This one I am trying to forget. Actually, it was in Boulder, Colorado and I lost a lot of money.

[1:51] But prior to starting KAYAK, I can tell you a little bit about it. My brother Ed and I had started a company called InterMute to get rid of spyware. We ended up selling that to Trend Micro. I also created a small company in Arlington called Boston Light Software named after the lighthouse. And we built eCommerce software for small businesses. We ended up selling that to Intuit, where I became VP of Technology and was at Intuit for about three and a half years.

[2:18] That was a really, really fun job. I learned a lot about customer service and focus, and also helped lead the creation of the Intuit Innovation Lab - how you do innovation at a big company, and the Intuit Developer Network - how to build open platforms on top of a wide set of applications which might not have been built for a platform.

[2:38] So, programmer by training, and have always had hunger to start new things.

Larry: [2:46] Great. So, you left out your first job with Interleaf.

Paul:[2:51] Interleaf, that's right. Interleaf was a fantastic job. You know, my first job, actually, was working - OK, the first job that was legal was working for Mini-Mart. I was a 16 year old stock boy or something. I remember one time crushing the giant box in the box-pressing machine. And the pharmacist who ran that store came to me and screamed at me a stream of obscenities and said, "You're an idiot! You'll never do anything in life! I can't believe you can't even use a compacting machine." Think about that. But that was my first job. [laughter]

[3:29] When I went to Mass, I didn't apply to college. I wasn't going to go to school. Last minute, I did end up going to school. And I had a series of jobs, everything from working for the Air Force doing data acquisition and control systems, doing some operations research for Data General, doing medical device software for Humanetics and Braintree, and doing video game development for my brother Ed English for one of his companies.

[3:53] But my first real, real job after I actually had a degree was working for this guy. And I must say it was a lot of fun. I have a list that I keep of things I've learned in management over the last 20 years. And probably three of those 15 things in that list are things I learned from Larry, the most important of which, I think, is how to defuse tension, diffuse tense situations.

[4:18] And we had a number of staff meetings - Larry had an extraordinary staff that I felt very lucky to be a member of. It was a really special team. And that helped bond, in me, the need to form good teams. But also, he was very good, when there was fighting between the team or whatever, he had some very good techniques for just making that stuff go away. And it's lessons that I've continued to use to this day.

Larry: [4:41] Well, one of the reasons that I wanted to bring that up is that when you first came to Interleaf, I think you were right out UMass, and within like nine months you took over the development organization, because you were just a tremendous technical talent. [4:56] But then, what's interesting is that team that you started and you really built has followed you through several companies. And so some of what I think you've done in just a spectacular way has been to lead that development team. So I wanted you to talk a little bit about your philosophy. How do you develop high quality teams? Especially, you talk a lot about how you recruit people. You know, what your philosophy is around competence and performance. And I think that would be really useful for people to hear.

Paul:[5:27] Sometimes I give talks at local universities about starting companies. And I remember once one of the students asked me, "Why do you start companies?" And my first thought was, actually, "I want something to do when my kids are in school." But I really look at starting companies as an opportunity to create a team. And for me, at KAYAK, I've always been very clear that our priorities are team first, customer second. And I think for a company that is so explicit about customer second, we have more intense customer focus than any tech company I've seen yet. I mean we can talk a little bit about that, and then profit third. [6:05] And I really feel very strongly to the core that focusing that way is what happens. On the team first, there's recruiting, there's hiring, there's firing, and there's leading. In each of those areas, I try to apply what I've learned from people I thought were good leaders, whether it was at Intuit or Interleaf, or any other company.

[6:28] Part of the recruiting thing, forming a good team, is you do want to start with a nucleus of people who have worked together and have a proven formula. And you want to do anything to get that team together. And also, you want to do anything to get your team as strong as you can.

[6:44] The difference between an A player or an A+ player is the difference between a million in revenue or a billion in revenue. It's really extraordinary how much just putting that little extra effort into recruiting and the dividends that can pay back to you.

[6:58] When we formed KAYAK - and I think Larry was modest when he said that General Catalyst was an investor in KAYAK. I look at General Catalyst as the creator of KAYAK. Larry was the one who introduced me and my co-founder, Steve Hafner. Joel Cutler is our director. And we really started the company within General Catalyst.

[7:16] But when we started that, there were two guys in particular I wanted to join my team, a guy named Paul Schwenk, who is currently Senior Vice President of Engineering for KAYAK, and then a guy named Bill O'Donnell who is...I think the title I've given him is Ultra Vice President of Code.

[7:32] When I wanted Paul and Bill to work with me again, I called them and said, "I'm starting another company. I want you guys to come join us." And I think at the time they were each working - they were still at Intuit. I had left more than a year...

Larry: [7:45] But they had followed you there.

Paul:[7:46] They had followed me to Intuit, yeah. So we worked on and off together for 20 years. But when I tried to pull them out of Intuit, I had taken a year off to help care for my dad and do some other things. I remember one of the questions... [7:59] So these guys are making three and four hundred thousand dollars a year as programmers at Intuit; very, very gifted guys. And they said, "Well, what's the company?" I said, "It's a travel search engine." "Do you have funding?" "Well, sort of. You know, we're about to get funding." "How much will you pay us?" I said, "100K." I'm sure their wives were really excited about this.

[laughter 0:08:19]

Paul: [8:19] And then they said, "Well, where will the company be located?" I said, "I really don't care. You can put it in your backyard." And unfortunately, they said, "Maynard." I was like, "Shit!" [laughter 0:08:29]

Paul: [8:29] I hope I'm not offending anyone here, but... [laughter 0:08:34]

Paul:[8:32] It wasn't my favorite commute. But I really wanted these guys. And my belief is, in recruiting, if you do whatever it takes to get this extraordinary team together, that team will build the next team. I think a lot about energy. At times I've recruited at KAYAK, I've brought people in and I've found people on buses or trains or whatever and I detect talent, I'll aggressively recruit and I'll bring them in, and they'll meet my team. [9:00] Sometimes they'll see they've heard good things about me or they liked an interview with me, and I'll ways just say to them, "Trust me, you'll be here a few months and you will realize the reason you are here is not for me. It's for these other people that will be around you."

[9:10] And I just take it really seriously, the commitment to just do whatever it takes to make that team strong. I have, even at Intuit, one of the things I did was I led recruiting for them. I instituted something that, at least during my time there, was a seven day rule.

[9:24] The first time you hear someone's name - so if Larry had mentioned to me there is a VP of Marketing he used to know and he thinks the guy is in Australia. He's not quite sure, but the guy was unbelievable. As soon as he mentions this guy's name, it's like a clock starts ticking and that goes into color and my world goes black and white. I have seven days to track him down, back channel, get him in for two series of interviews that are intense and focused, and make an offer and have him accept it. That's seven days when I hear the person's name.

[9:51] And I think having that speed, you might think that makes me sloppy. I think it's actually quite the reverse. When you force yourself to do something fast, the only way you can execute fast is if you have process.

[10:03] And a lot of forming great teams, to me, is just, how hungry are you? How aggressive are you? And my advice to other entrepreneurs when you are starting new ventures, if you look yourself in the mirror, you know that, really, it's not like the thing you are most hungry for in the middle of the day, you will read your emails instead of look at that resume. You have to find a co-founder that I would say is 50/50 split with you, that that's what they care about, because it just makes absolutely all the difference in the world.

Larry: [10:29] So, maybe talk a little bit about starting KAYAK, founding KAYAK. And especially, you know, you were not a consumer Internet guy. You weren't at travel guy. And yet, you built, arguably, the best and biggest online travel company in the world, and one that's competing now with Google and others. So how'd you do it? How'd you build a team? What's the culture like? And, you know, what could you share about that?

Paul:[10:57] Sure. It's a fun company. There are some unusual things about it. One of them is my co-founder and I. My co-founder's name is Steve Hafner. He is one of the founders of Orbitz, and he left Orbitz in December of '03, which is when I met him. [11:10] I was introduced to Steve - I was actually working with Bill Kaiser as an EI over at Greylock. But I was over at General Catalyst one day looking at a mobile company for John Simon, I believe. And then on my way out, Larry and Joel Cutler introduced me to this guy Steve Hafner and said he is starting a travel company. He's leaving Orbitz, would I give him some advice?

[11:32] So Steve and I went downstairs to Legal Sea Foods in Harvard Square, had a couple drinks. And I think within 45 minutes we agreed to do it as co-founders. We each were going to throw a bunch of money in. And I think part of that was both of us, my co-founder and I, are risk takers, and both of us, I think, have a very good read on other people.

[11:53] And Steve and I are similar in many ways, but we are also very different in actual technical skill set. But we both detected a level of aggression or commitment in the other one, and we both felt that, "Wow, if you put two co-founders together that are this aggressive..."

[12:11] I might not sound aggressive now, because I just arrived on a redeye from San Francisco, so I am a little bit tired. But, we thought that starting with a team that our job was just to state a plan and say, "We're going to get there. We're going to build the biggest travel company in the world," when we just had six slides of PowerPoint. And then somehow getting people to believe us that we were going to do that, and recruiting people to help execute that plan.

[12:37] So I think it starts with belief.

Larry: [12:38] Yep. So, one of the things I remember that I think was tremendous was when we first talked about you coming into KAYAK, you were thrilled at the idea of building software that your friends could use. Because up to then, I think most of the stuff you built, even though, at Intuit, people were...

Paul: [12:58] Intuit was really eye-opening for me. Before then, when I would tell people - "What do you do?" "I work in an operations research group at data general, and we're studying advanced processes for doing disc drive manufacturing." [laughter 0:13:12]

Paul: [13:13] It didn't go over well.

Larry: [13:15] Right. So I remember you being, like, thrilled, like, "I'm going to build something fabulous that my friends can use, and it's going to be really exciting." And I think that was a big motivation when you were recruiting some of the members of the team.

Paul: [13:24] It was.

Larry: [13:25] Talk a little bit about how the company was founded. Certain journalists in Boston reported that you stole the idea. Talk a little bit about the beginning and then how it developed, the acquisition and things like that. I think that's a great story about a Boston company.

Paul:[13:45] So, we were not the first to do travel as a search engine. If you think about the creation of online travel industry with the formation of companies like Travelocity and Expedia, and then followed by Orbitz, and Priceline, etc, those guys are all merchants, where they show you a limited set of inventory. [14:04] If you look for a hotel in New York tonight, Expedia won't show you every hotel in New York. They only show you the ones that they rep. KAYAK will show you ever hotel because we are a search engine. We weren't the first guys out there to be a pure search engine. Saying, "Gee, this Google thing seems to be working. Can we build one of those but just for travel?" There were FairChase, SideStep; a couple companies before us that did different approaches to what we ended up taking.

[14:30] SideStep was interesting. They had a downloadable toolbar that if you searched Expedia, they would pop up a window in the side showing you other rates if you could search other sites. They were a couple years ahead of us. They were much bigger than us in revenue on our second or third year, but we ended up acquiring them. They tried to acquire us a couple times.

[14:52] I had sold two companies. I didn't want to sell a company again. So my venture guys would sometimes say, "You know, explore it." And I'd have the meeting knowing in my mind that there is no way I am going to sell this company.

[laughter 0:15:01]

[15:01] But each time, we would negotiate and valuations would come up, and there would be always a mis-set expectation about what the other company was worth, because if you do a stock deal, it's more percentage, but then it's this game of what you are each worth.

[15:16] And in each of these meetings over the years when there were bigger companies than us who were interested in what we had built and our team, et cetera, if we had disagreements, I would just say, "That's all right. Let's just talk again in a year." And I just had this belief that our valuation grew quicker than the other party.

[15:33] In the case of SideStep, it did. In December of '07, we had 39 employees and we raised $230 million at a very high valuation to acquire what was our biggest competitor, SideStep, in California. And that was a very good deal for us for getting their customer base. And it's just one important milestone. It's fun to take out your big competitor.

Larry: [15:57] Paul is a very competitive person, and I remember, at the beginning, when SideStep was a couple years ahead, it was a West Coast company funded by good venture people. How did you win? You ended up blowing by SideStep, and you ended up buying them and really taking advantage of them. How did you do it?

Paul: [16:18] And I did love the East Coast acquires West? [applause 0:16:23]

Paul:[16:25] We could spend an hour just on that topic. And I know there's some powerful people in the room here. I hope all you guys are encouraging all your companies to say, "Don't give up. At least don't give up early. Push something bigger." [16:38] I really want to create extraordinary East Coast companies and change the culture here, and there's a lot of work to be done with that. I think if you compare us to SideStep, they were good guys, but, I don't know.

[16:53] Not to be harsh, but the simplest way to say this to compare the two companies, it had nothing to do with strategy. It had to do with the team. We had one project manager. They had seven. And we just recruited a different level of talent than they did.

[17:11] And you go down the line, finance, sales, marketing, whatever, I think people would say, when they would go to a KAYAK meeting, or they go to a SideStep meeting and then they go visit KAYAK, they'd leave. We usually get good feedback when people leave meeting with our team. Everything from people saying things like, I'm vibrating from that meeting, or there's some electricity, or whatever. And I think we out-executed so many people, because we out-hired, is the simplest thing.

[17:37] Second of that, the way our team organizes around customers is different than what I've seen in other tech companies.

Larry Bohn: [17:41] Yeah, talk about that, and talk about - because I really do, I started as you build a much better product. And talk about how you build a great product, and how you got feedback about that product, and how you still do.

Paul:[17:55] Yeah, so travel is something that I love. I've never worked in the travel industry. In fact, when hiring the tech team at KAYAK, when we were mostly the first five years - we're six years old now - the first five years, it's a bit of an oversimplification, but I would say there were only two types who worked at KAYAK. You were either a programmer, or you were a business development manager, and two-thirds of them were programmers. [18:16] We're growing now on the marketing side and the finance side, but, in general, when I hired the tech team, one of my requirements was I refused to hire someone who has ever worked in travel before. And my board didn't like this. We recruited a good board. Part of this, is the aggression we had in recruiting, but we recruited Terry Jones, the original founder of Travelocity, was, became, our Chairman. Greg Slyngstad, the original creator of Microsoft Expedia, became a Director and investor. So this amazing travel portfolio on our board, but I refused to hire travel people.

And what would happen is, at our board meetings, I would present, this is the product plan. The board would sit back, you seem like a really nice guy, you seem really smart, but I can't believe you don't know what a passenger type code is [Larry laughs 0: [18:46] 18:54] . It's not possible to fly a plane, from here to here, without doing this. And they kept saying that I would be proposing stupid things, and they kept begging me to hire someone who had actually worked in travel before. And I would do what - are we allowed to swear here?

Larry: [19:09] Yeah, absolutely. You're among friends.

Paul: [laughs 0:19:11] [19:11] I would do what later became know as a grin fuck, where... [laughter 0:19:14]

Larry: [19:14] Which he does a lot to his investors.

Paul: [19:17] Yeah.

Larry: [19:17] Totally.

Paul: [19:18] The most famous one is when our board told us - we incorporated as Travel Search Company as a placeholder and we told the board we were going to call the company KAYAK - one of the investors said, "You'll name this company KAYAK over my dead body." And I said, thanks for the input.

Larry: [19:33] Right. [laughter 0:19:33]

Paul:[19:34] But we tend to, you know, on the hiring thing, I didn't want travel people. I wanted consumer people. And I wanted people that were committed to the best team ever. I wanted people committed to intense focus on customer. [19:48] We don't have enough time here now, but there's eight key processes that we use at KAYAK right now, for how customers get engaged with engineers. I'm about to add the ninth, which is going to be live web chat over Skype. If you just randomly hit our feedback page, you'll connect live in our engineering team.

[20:04] But another one, that is we've become a little bit known for, is we have this red phone in our office. And I took some time to try to find the most obnoxious phone I could, with a really loud ringer, and it's directly wired into our engineering office.

[20:19] And when you click the help button on KAYAK, you see this phone number, it shows up every now and then. We have two million people a day coming to the website. The phone number shows up, right now, about 30 percent of the time. But I can dial that up and down.

[20:30] And when the phone rings, it rings very loudly. And the engineers used to complain to me that this is so annoying, this phone. I was like, if it's too loud and it interrupts you, it's very simple what to do. Number one, if you actually pick up the receiver, and lift it off the phone, it stops ringing.

[laughter 0:20:47]

Paul:[20:49] The second thing is, if you then hold it, and there's a human on the other end of the line, do whatever it takes to make them happy, like really happy. And when you're done, you can hang up the phone, you can unplug it, walk down to the other end of the hall and plug it in down there. And we had a little bit of a hot potato. [laughter 0:21:07]

[21:06] But if you visit us, my office, we're across from Pepperazzi, on Route two in Concord now, getting a little bit closer to where I live in Arlington, from my original home in Maynard. But if you visit us, you'll see that when the phone rings, I will literally jump over desks to answer it.

[21:22] And I think there are two reasons. One, I love talking to customers. And two, I'm trying to set the tone for the company, that we're a company that executes in real time. And by executing in real time, it means time is defined by customers and what's going on with them right now.

Larry: [21:36] So, KAYAK's a big company now. It's a couple hundred million dollars. It's very profitable. It's very high profile. It's probably the top consumer Internet company in the area and it gets noticed. So there are some big players coming into this space.

Paul: [21:53] Sure.

Larry: [21:55] So talk a little bit about how you compete at that level. How do you build a really significant company? What do you worry about as the company gets bigger? Things like that.

Paul:[22:07] Yeah, I'm excited about change and having people take notice. We're a big company in terms of reach. So last month we had 60 million customer sessions on the site. That's pretty good for a startup. [22:20] And these are people who come to KAYAK with the intention of buying something which is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's good traffic. We're a small company in that we're only 100 people.

[22:30] Expedia's a few times bigger than us in traffic, but they are 100 times bigger than us in employees. So, revenue per employee is a very important thing for me. And I have some secret recipes about how you can create companies with $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 revenue per employee. It has to do with the type of people you hire and how you align them.

[22:49] But we have been successful. We're continuing to grow very rapidly. Travel is eight percent of the U.S. GDP, but it's almost half of eCommerce. The reason it scales disproportionally high is that travel is something; it's very easy to buy online. You don't need a FedEx truck to show up. And it's also high-ticket items.

[23:10] Because we've been so profitable with the model we've built and we're growing so fast, we're getting attention. Google is entering more and more into our space. There's all kinds of rumors circulating about them maybe even doing an acquisition of another local Boston travel company. It's a company in Cambridge called ITA Software, which is one of the technologies we actually use in our backend.

[23:31] Now, when people ask me if I am afraid of Google, my first response is - and I'm getting excited right now just thinking about this is, "Bring it on!"

[laughter 0:23:40]

Paul: [23:40] And I know how dangerous that is. I know there's probably some idiot at MapQuest that said, "Bring it on!" And they didn't see what happened to them when Google just vanished them from the earth. [laughter 0:23:53]

Paul:[23:53] And I have a friend who worked on the Google Maps team and she told me what they actually did. It was astonishing, the force that Google brought to that space and the massive innovation. But, in general, I like being competitive. I think it motivates a good team and I think it ultimately leads to good products for customers. [24:12] Will Google be successful in travel? I don't know. Let's take a look at some other things Google's working on right now. So you guys all know Twitter and Facebook. How are you liking that Google Buzz and Wave thing? Is everyone going to use that every day?

[laughter 0:24:26]

Paul: [24:27] Google's not successful in everything they do. I don't mean to dis them. I think it's a phenomenal, transformational company. I think it's one of the most, maybe the most, tech company created to date. But if they come with a direct KAYAK competitor, I swear to God it's going to get me excited more than scared. And we have a lot of cool stuff coming out.

Larry: [24:48] Great. So, maybe shift topics a little bit because you do KAYAK during the day and then, at night, you do a million other things. And the million other things, I think, is fascinating; from philanthropy to technology. Why don't you talk a little bit about the thing you're passionate about outside of KAYAK?

Paul: [25:06] Sure. Yeah. So, work related outside of KAYAK. And the other thing - so Scott, who I feel bad, invited me to this conference here, a few times and I kept turning him down. In general, I don't do industry things. I don't read business books. I don't go to travel conferences. I don't go to industry events, because I love my work. I love my team. I love my customers. But, when I'm outside work, I want to be with my kids or with my girlfriend or reading or traveling or whatever.

Larry: [25:30] Our biking, biking. Yeah.

Paul: [25:32] Or biking with Larry, trying to get ready for Pan-Mass if he doesn't kick my ass like he did last year. [laughter 0:25:37]

Paul:[25:39] But there are some things I do, outside of my nine - 5, that are very important to me in areas relating to global health. So, I've been doing some work with Paul Farmer for about 10 years now. I met him through a mutual friend, a guy named Tom White who is 90 years old this year. [25:55] And I have projects now in six countries that I have different levels of involvement in, starting in Haiti, but then in Rwanda, Burundi. In fact, as soon as I leave this, I gotta get to New York for a board meeting for Village Health Works which is a Burundian based clinic we're building.

[26:13] So I have products in different levels of involvement. So, Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia. I guess those are the big six, and then smaller ones elsewhere.

[26:26] One of the things I'm learning recently, as you build medical clinics in new areas, there's three things you need to do in terms of infrastructure in the following order. One is get clean water. There's a lot of cool innovation happening there in cost reduction and quality improvement. And it's dramatic in terms of how much it transforms a village when clean water gets put it. I cannot overstate how much you can change an economy, education, everything by clean water.

[26:56] The second thing you want is clean power. And a lot of power innovation is actually happening in developing countries because it's their only option, is to find new ways to get power. There's some very interesting research and partnerships being done at MIT in different developing country areas.

[27:14] And the third thing you want is clean Tel-Co. I've seen what happens to a clinic, a remote clinic, when they doctors - more likely, there's not enough doctors and nurses, but the community health workers, when they have access to email or Skype, it changes thing in a big way.

[27:31] And I've realized in each of these projects I'm involved in, in different capacities, the Internet thing kept coming up. And so recently - I guess this is the first time I'm talking about this. But I'm at the beginning of a new project, which will be my next 10 year project. I'll be at KAYAK, of course, pushing it, pushing it, but I'm starting a new project that has an audacious goal of creating free low-bandwidth Internet for the whole continent of Africa.

[28:04] And the reason someone would try to do something that crazy is if you see, firsthand, how education, healthcare, and economic development is transformed when information flows freely, the challenge is how to do it and how to do it that big.

[28:22] And the reason I like to think that big is, you know, we all measure the size of our life, and we each want to get a lot of stuff done. And I want to get a lot done. And so, rather than taking about half a dozen countries and villages, it's like, "Let's think much bigger."

[28:40] And when you think bigger, it forces you to innovate in ways in which you wouldn't have thought about if you were just worried about doing something in Cange in rural Haiti. And so I've started a project now. I have two Sloan students working for me fulltime for the summer. And I have some other collaboration at MIT and elsewhere in different countries in Africa. And if anyone here does African IT and you want to get in touch with me about this project and you want to help, my email address is paul {at} kayak {dotcom} .

Larry: [29:08] Great. We have a couple minutes left. Maybe open up to any questions from people in the audience for Paul. Any topic at all.

Man 1: [29:19] Paul, so the Google [indecipherable 0:29:22] . It would seem to me that Google has failed in areas that are not search related, but actually has done, as you indicated, with mapping [indecipherable 0:29:35] search and they've done quite well. So I'm wondering how your investors are reacting to that information.

Paul:[29:46] Yeah. We've seen Google coming for a long time. KAYAK is six years old. For six years, I've told my team, "Google is six months away." I've been saying that for six years, and I'm still saying it. It might be less than that. [30:04] Google has already started encroaching on our space. The Google Maps product, which is a great product, now has the ability to - they're testing showing some hotel availability and pricing. They have this one box solution, if you type in Boston, Miami, you count the dates and kick off searches from there to KAYAK and other sites. Clearly, that could easily be integrated.

[30:27] It's true that Google, if you look at the 30 verticals where Google exists, I think they lead in maybe two of the 30, two or three, search and Gmail. I love Gmail. It's not the number one email service provider yet, but I do love that.

[30:43] But a lot of it - they do have search products which are not the best right now. I think Amazon is a better search for product than is Froogle or Google Products. But when they come after some travel, you'll see that there are a lot of different things we're going to be doing that are things that Google can't do and won't do as well as KAYAK is going to do.

[31:02] There are some things that we are doing with Facebook that Google can't do and won't do. There are some things we're doing with Apple that Google can't do and won't do. There are some things dealing with travel that we are going to have a different spin on it than the way people at Google think about consumer software.

[31:15] And I'm sure I'm going to get some bruises in this fight, but we're looking forward to it. I think travel is too important for someone to just not have a trusted, "This is my travel app. This is the thing that I trust will get the unbiased, every hotel in the world, every flight, every rent-a-car, cruise." And I think having an independent brand for travel makes sense as long as we can keep innovating, and as long as each month our product gets simpler and faster. And, you know, I'm signed up to do it. We'll see what happens.

Larry: [31:48] And your investors are filing behind you.

Paul: [31:49] Yes. [laughter 0:31:50]

Man 2: [31:53] I have a two part question. One is, we spent three weeks in Africa recently, and the availability of healthcare professionals is dismal in Africa in general. One question is: Do you see a solution around that space? And the second question has to do with your philosophy around managing your board of directors and that comment from your board member. Is he dead? [laughter 0:32:20]

Larry: [32:23] He's not on the board! [laughs 0:32:24]

Paul:[32:27] Yeah, he's a bigger guy than me, too. So on the first one, the healthcare, Paul Farmer says there should be no such thing as healthcare volunteers. There should be healthcare workers. [32:43] And so Partners in Health, starting in Haiti, they created a program called A Company at Tour, which is taking someone who is a former patient, maybe dying of AIDS, and once they get in for treatment, you bring them back and make them strong and healthy so they can now care for the kids and whatnot. In most cases, A Company at Tour hires women, women being better providers, and more responsible, in many cases.

[33:10] And what Paul's team has done is take these former patients and say, "OK. You are in good shape now. You've put on 30 pounds. This is what you looked like before. You can now take care of your kids. You're strong. Here is the deal. You now work for us, but it is under the following conditions. We are going to pay you. So we'll pay you maybe $10 a month," which in undeveloped countries, that's an awesome salary.

[33:40] "Number two is we are going to put you through rigorous training and testing and certification. This is not a volunteer organization. This is something that is intense. When you finish our training program, we're going to put you in charge of four, or five, or six homes, and your job is to do whatever it takes to keep people alive and healthy."

[33:57] And the thing that's amazing about this is you go into an area where it's very, you know, economically depressed, where there's no - these things feed on each other - where's there no economy. There's not good education, there's not good healthcare. When you start building healthy members of population who are then given the tools and the finances, which doesn't cost that much, to then help keep everyone else in good shape, there are a lot of good things that happen.

[34:28] Fertility goes down. There's this myth from the Western World that, "Gee, these people are so screwed because they have too many babies." That's not accurate. There's a lot you can do when these health workers become trained and take care of them even if you don't have doctors there's a lot you can do with a village taking care of itself.

[34:46] And Paul Flower has proven again, and again, in the countries he's been in. So I like that model. There are other models, but I like that one. On the second question, the person who relates to that quote is a good friend of mind, David Fialco. He works with Larry at General Catalyst. Like I said, he's a little bigger than me, so I hope he didn't take me too seriously.

Larry: [35:04] If you took literally everything he said he'd be dead 100 times.

Paul: [35:09] But Fialco and I became very good friends. We started off with a little pretentiousness in the relationship but he's an amazing guy.

Larry: [35:21] Talk a little bit more about your board. I mean, you've got Mike Moritz there. You sometimes complain to me about your board. Be honest.

Paul:[35:28] No. We have a great board. We had a board meeting yesterday in San Fran. So in addition to Terry Jones, the founder of Travelocity, as our chairman, he's a great industry guy. Greg Slyngstad, creative expediter is a director and investor. Incredibly product guy. He was the first program manager for Word for the first Sun releases. Even though he gave Larry and me some pain. [35:49] We looked at Word and said, "That little toy, that's not going to hurt us. We are real desktop publishing." So Greg is the guy who kind of kicked both of our asses. Michael Moritz from Sequoia.

[35:59] Michael is arguably the most well known venture capitalist in the world. He's been on Google's board, Yahoo's board, et cetera, et cetera. I spent the whole day with him yesterday. The thing that most impressed me with Michael is confidence, he's concise, just always about what can you do to raise the stakes.

[36:23] And I have so many great stories of things I've learned from him at my time at KAYAK. We also have Harry Nelis from Excel UK. We we were created within General Catalyst series A, and Mike Coffin and I.

[36:35] Series B was Michael Moritz at Sequoia. Series C was Harry Nelis at Accel. The reason I took money out of Accel UK, the theory was if I took European money it would help me with recruiting in Europe. Hasn't worked out exactly the way I wanted. But Harry's a very good guy. An ex-Goldman guy. Don't hold that against him.

[36:51] And then Michael Moritz at our series D again when we did the acquisition of Side Step. So it's a pretty amazing board.

Larry: [36:57] And Joe.

Paul: [36:59] And of course, Joel Cutler. Who I view actually as the creator of KAYAK is Joel Cutler. Joel's the one that put Steve and I together. Joel has deep roots in travel. And if you don't know him, you want to get to know him. He's completely insane. And I love him to death. He's great.

Larry: [37:18] Any other - back there, Scott.

Scott: [37:21] I was just curious, do you much thinking about for AV testing around how do you actually get transactions to happen? What have you learned about kind of what moves the needle with someone who's s just a KAYAK researcher versus a real devoted KAYAK buyer?

Paul:[37:36] Yes. We have a whole experiments platform. A couple of years ago I hired a guy named Giorgos Zacharia at MIT as our chief scientist. I think Giorgos has five of the 25 MIT degrees I've hired in the last couple of years. [37:53] One of his jobs at KAYAK is to run the whole analytics platform, so that at any moment we are running multiple versions of KAYAK. If you run KAYAK on one computer and the next one, side to side, they can look radically different. Some of our experiments are short-lived. We run them just for a day or half a day. Some of them will go on for more than three months. There's a lot we learn from that machine. It's a machine learning platform as well.

[38:15] And we absolutely are one of these companies that fights about what color blue should that blue be. And how many pixels should the lettering be between this line and that line. And part of it is we have a particular aesthetic which I have to admit, I don't think I've said this before, but our original plan was to be the anti-Expedia.

[38:35] So Expedia was the big guy in the space. So we said, "OK we are going to go in this crowded space, there's hundreds of venture backed companies, let's pick the biggest guy and lets do what they're not doing." And Expedia had this very - I'll try to be kind - lush look. And so we took this Craigslist approach.

[38:51] Or Tufty, Simplicity. And we have a certain design that lives within a few of us. But we test it like crazy. And we do evolve it. Every Thursday a new release of KAYAK goes out. On the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, we release new versions of those software probably every three weeks. And interestingly, those are taking a different look than the website. We are actually taking a more beautiful look on mobile than we do on the website. Any other questions?

Larry: [39:24] Dharmesh.

Dharesh: [39:26] I'm really inspired by the seven day maniacal, go after someone that [indecipherable 0:39:29] . Any advice as the organization grows in terms with recruiting entrepreneurial talent, because that five employees is easier to do than a 50 versus 500, how do you get those entrepreneurial types and recruit them? What did you do? What are your tactics?

Paul:[39:43] Yeah. I mean the first thing is identifying them. And how badly do you want those people. So if you ask any KAYAK employee, "How often does Paul ask you who's the smartest person you ever knew? Who's the fastest person?" Whatever. They are annoyed. Because I ask them the same question. I find 20 ways to ask the same question. If people are with me for 20 years, I keep asking the same question. [40:03] I'm hoping they'll ask me one of these times but it they haven't yet. So part of it is a hunger just to find these people. And there's a woman I just hired. Her name is Iolanthe Chronus.

[40:14] I hired her as program manager for all of mobile for KAYAK. She's 23 years old. It's been an incredible responsibility we are putting on her shoulders. And when I first heard about Iolanthe or Lanthe, there was another young programmer that we had, and I asked her who's the sharpest person you've ever met.

[40:30] He said, "Lanthe." No. He actually didn't give me her name. He said, "There's a woman at MIT." I said well who is she? He goes, "I'm not going to tell you her name." I said, "Why won't you tell me her name?" And instantly like the clock already started ticking, and it took me actually a couple days to get her name. He said, "I don't want to tell you her name because I'm hoping that she might start her own company and I might go join her."

[40:55] And this guy Pete, I love him too. So I'm like, OK, now there's two reasons why I need Lanthe. I don't want to lose Pete.

[41:02] Anyway I finally conned him into getting me a meeting with her. And she had already been in the final stages of accepting a job in California. But, I got her to join KAYAK. And part of it was the aggression the whole team put on. Someone actually interviewed her about what it was like to interview at KAYAK. And she said it was breathtaking because she walked in and she felt like, "Wow, this team not only interviewed her but that team had a mission, which was to get her to join the team."

[41:29] She walked away feeling, "Holy shit." This team is highly competent and they are really, really aggressively going after her. So she turned down the West Coast and stayed with us. I think bringing on young leaders and leaders that have worked in different spaces and think differently, that have different ways of doing risks, is always healthy to reinvent themselves. I hope we are always going to be doing that.

Larry: [41:53] Great. Well, I think we are out of time.

Bill: [41:57] One more question?

Larry: [41:58] Time for one more question. Bill.

Bill: [42:00] Well, it's actually something we had discussed before about the [indecipherable 0:42:04] because I think it's such a groovy thing. But you have an insanely small team. And when you have an insanely small team and really insanely by revenue per employee, that can fuel - and most people don't even believe it's possible to do what you do.

Paul:[42:22] Yeah. And people don't believe that we answer every email. We had two million people on the website today. Try, go to KAYAK, hit the feedback button, send an email. You'll get a personal reply from me or one of the engineers. Like, the math doesn't work. How do you do that? I don't have any support people. And people will say why would you pay an engineer a buck fifty instead of paying someone in Tucson $8.00 an hour. [42:41] And the reason I answer every single email that comes in. I personally read every email. And myself and the engineers answer every email. Is that it's a bit of a tautology, if we take support seriously rather than deflecting you to an IVR or to our frequently asked questions that we take everyone personally.

[43:00] What's going to happen is the second or third time we get the same question we are going to say I am so sick of answering that question. I better stop what I am doing and go back and rewrite that UI so I never get that question again. And we are really, really serious about it. So I think that's been one of our secrets is that we answer every call.

Larry: [43:21] Terrific. Thank you for coming. [applause 0:43:24]

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A lot to think about and digest.  I encourage you to read/listen to the whole thing if you have time.

Any particular points resonate with you?  Are you inspired to go buy a loud-ringing red phone for your startup? 

 

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Why Startups Should ALWAYS Compromise When Hiring

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Thu, Apr 23, 2009

There’s a non-zero chance that you’re reading this because you were thinking:  “What the heck is he talking about?  Shouldn't startups be hiring the best people possible?  What's this about comprimising?”

And, if you were thinking that, you’d be right.  Startups should hire the best people possible.  But, if you re-read the title, you’ll notice that I’m saying you should always compromise.  Why?  Because there’s no such thing as the absolutely perfect hire along every possible dimension.  If you recruit people that you think were a “no-compromise” hire, you’re deluding yourself with unrealistic expectations.  Nobody’s perfect (and if they are, you probably couldn’t recruit or afford them anyways).

Everyone you bring on is a compromise.  The trick is to compromise on the right things.

Let me explain.  Here are several different attributes or “dimensions of awesomeness” you might seek for your startup recruit:

1.  Passion:  Are they fired-up?

2.  Experience:  Have they done this particular job before?  Did they succeed at it?

3.  Intelligence:  Are they smart?

4.  Academics:  Do they have the right degree?  From the right place?

5.  Hunger:  Are they motivated?  Are they ambitious?

6.  Risk-Tolerance:  Can they share the risk?  Or, are they looking to make fair market value?

7.  Scrappiness:  Can they get by with little?  Are they resourceful?

8.  Loyalty:  Can you get them to commit to your cause?  Will they be fiercely loyal?

Those are just a few I thought of off the top of my head.  It’s by no means a complete list.  I intentionally left out things like “integrity”, because it’s hard to argue in favor of compromising on integrity.  That’s just plain stupid.

But just about all of the attributes listed above could be compromised a little in exchange for something else.  For example, if you were somehow able to grade a recruit along all these dimensions, you might find that someone scores “average” in the academics dimension — but is off-the-charts smart (happens all the time).  So, you might decide that it’s OK for them not to have an ivy league degree.  Or, someone might be so smart, passionate and entrepreneurial — but lacking in experience.  Perhaps that’s OK too.  Or, maybe you really do have to have the absolutely perfect person along every possible dimension, but they’re so good, you’re just not sure you’re going to be able to keep them engaged.  Perhaps you’ll have to compromise on the loyalty front.

The point is, like with just about everything related to startups (and lots of things in life), there are tradeoffs.  You need to figure out which dimensions are absolutely critical (where you will not give), and which ones you’re willing to compromise a little on.  There’s no right answer — it depends on your business, your culture, your values and your instincts. 

What do you think?  Which attributes of people do you value the most?  What would you be willing to compromise on, if you could get almost everything else?  What things do you hold inviolate — that you would never compromise on?  Please leave a comment.

Or, if you'd prefer, you can take the conversation to twitter.  You can find me @dharmesh on twitter.

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