Boldly Pitch the Founding team to Get People to Join Your Journey, Tips on Hiring Executive Talent - Tactician #0056

"Getting people to join your startup is all about selling your team. 'We're not just smart; we're the kind of smart that makes smart people say, 'Wow, that's a lot of books.'"

13/02/2024

Boldly Pitch the Founding team to Get People to Join Your Journey

Andrew Chen, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, encourages founders to pitch their ideas, teams, and themselves more boldly and optimistically in ”The “Dinner Party Jerk” test — why founders need to pitch themselves harder and more futuristically”

• Importance of Pitching Your Team at the Pre-Seed Stage

  • "Pre-seed- Bet on the team. Startups often struggle at pitching their team, even though for the earliest stage companies, it’s incredibly important to do it well to raise capital."

• Don’t Omit Your Team’s Achievements

  • "I find that most founders tend to focus, primarily on describing their idea to the exclusion of everything else...And they downplay their achievements or omit them."

• The "Dinner Party Jerk" Test for Effective Self-Promotion

  • "To figure out if you are properly pitching yourself in your team, run the thought experiment of describing yourselves at a dinner party. If you are pitching yourself hard, then if you are a kind human, you will turn red and blush with wild embarrassment."

• The Value of "Earned Secrets" and Non-Obvious Expertise

  • "Then the question becomes, what is your 'earned secret' behind the idea?...If you have some metrics or an observation about the market that’s non-obvious, showing your expertise in the field, is even more valuable."

• Using Facts and Figures to Prove Your Case

  • "The other very awkward thing is to use facts and figures to describe yourself. If in your previous work, you worked on an app that served millions of people, or for your current company, you recently launched and got your first 10,000 users, you should save these numbers."

• Convince People to Join Your Journey

  • "Let me also make the argument that this is the only logical way to convince people to join you on your journey. First, let’s talk about startup investors. a portfolio of startup investments is inherently risky, and the physics of venture math means that the winners have to be really big."

Tips on Hiring Executive Talent

Nolan Church, CEO at FairComp, and Kelli Dragovich, Growth Advisor at Sapphire Ventures, interview Matt Oberhardt, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to share insights on executive hiring and talent management strategies for startups in “Recruiting and Retaining the Right Executive Talent“

• Start by Writing the MOC document:

  • "What we really tried to do with the MOC—it stands for mission, outcome, competency. The mission is the elevator pitch. It’s the 1 or 2 lines that dictate exactly what you want this person to really deliver at a high level. The outcomes are basically 6 or 8 things that you want them to achieve in the course of the first 12 or 18 months in the job. And then the competencies are related to: what are the things this person needs to have accomplished? What are the skills that you need to have that we have evidence, therefore, they can actually achieve those outcomes?"

• Using whiteboard sessions for assessing fit:

  • "Go through a whiteboard session with an executive in an interview. Let’s actually take a real-world business situation you’re grappling with as a founder, and let’s brainstorm it together. And people just naturally, without even realizing it, start letting their guard down and start behaving like they truly are when you get into that pretend work session."

• Implementing referencing as a continuous cycle:

  • "Referencing should be almost like a continual loop. You’re interviewing, then you’re referencing, you’re interviewing, then you’re referencing. Referencing should be happening throughout a process."

• Putting negative references in context:

  • "Eventually if you call enough people, you will get a negative reference on somebody. That’s largely unavoidable. Now you get a negative reference, I think you have to evaluate, is it a state of the situation or as a trait of the individual?"

• Vetting for EQ:

  • "So when we’re talking to executives and evaluating them, it’s a lot about EQ. For example, how do you take feedback? What are the things that you’re aware of that might be your personal triggers? What do you see as your interpersonal impact in a room? What sort of balance do they have between humility and self-confidence? A lot of those things. We’re also looking at motivations: intrinsic motivations, extrinsic motivations."

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