You know how to build an A-team? It’s like hosting a Thanksgiving dinner.

You need someone to cook, someone to entertain the kids, and someone to stop Uncle Joe from falling asleep in the mashed potatoes.

How to Hire A-Players

Why Read:

• Provides valuable insights on effective hiring strategies from successful entrepreneurs and companies. These tips can help build a high-performing team crucial for startup success.

Featuring:

• Eric Siu (@ericosiu), CEO at Single Grain

Link: 

• “How Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos Hire A-Players”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

1. Be heavily involved in the hiring process, especially in the early stages: 

   • "Elon Musk with SpaceX the story is that he actually interviewed the first 3,000 people himself and similar story with the door Dash CEO I believe he interviewed the first thousand people or the first thousand people went through him"

2. Focus on hiring "bar raisers" who elevate the overall quality of the team: 

   • "Amazon has this concept known as bar raisers meaning that every single person that you're gonna that that the company's going to recruit they need to be a bar raiser meaning that they're going to raise the bar for the the average of whatever team that they're joining"

3. Prioritize hiring quality over filling positions quickly: 

   • "Just because there's a good person out there doesn't mean that you necessarily should hire these people you're not trying to make more friends at the end of the day you're trying to you're trying to do better for your customers at the end of the day so your company can do better"

4. Trust your gut feeling during the hiring process: 

   • "You got to trust your gut feeling at the end of the day because if you don't trust your gut feeling then you're that's going to lead to the bozo explosion in your company and when you have the bozo explosion that's going to be very hard to undo"

5. Always be on the lookout for potential talent: 

   • "I'm always on the hunt for for talent and there's always angles to figure out how to work together and sometimes it might take you one year, two years, three years, four years to hire someone really amazing and and that's okay because great talent often they're not looking for a job"

6. Use role scorecards instead of traditional job descriptions: 

   • "There's a really good book when it comes to hiring that will change the game for you and that book is called who and that's written by a guy named Jeff smart and he has this concept called roll scorecards"

7. Look for candidates with tenure and a history of promotions: 

   • "You want to look for someone that a has tenure and what I mean by that is they're not job hopping around every one year every two years or so they're hopping around... you want to see a history of promotions ideally two promotions right or maybe even three promotions plus"

Tips on Building Your 2nd Product

Why Read: 

• Gain insights on product expansion strategies, resource allocation, and decision-making processes from experienced entrepreneurs. These lessons can help avoid common pitfalls and guide strategic growth.

Featuring:

• First Round Capital (@firstround), Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals

Link:

• “The Guide to Going Multi-Product: 11 Tactics for Tackling Your Next Bet”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Timing the Launch of New Products:

  • Point: Wait until your core product is stable and you have momentum before launching new products.

  • "We'd heard horror stories from other companies that tried to expand too early. But we got good advice that you shouldn't expand until you feel like you're pedaling at half speed, until you're comfortable with all the progress that is being made in your core market," says Rhodes.

• Considering Early Multi-Product Strategy:

  • Point: In some cases, launching multiple products early can be beneficial if it aligns with your long-term vision.

  • "Watershed had to invest in multi-product really early in the company's life cycle because we thought that the future is integrated carbon accounting and decarbonization tools — you need to have both to make companies effective. That vision requires interlock," says Seshan.

• Expanding Product Offerings Based on Customer Workflow:

  • Point: Identify complementary tools your customers are using and consider incorporating those functionalities into your product suite.

  • "When you find product-market fit for your first product, you have to hit that next phase of growth. What's that next job you can solve for your customers? Unfortunately, I've seen many get this wrong by building something that's tangential to what they're doing today," says Glasgow.

• Balancing Data and Intuition in Decision-Making:

  • Point: While data is important, don't disregard intuition when making product decisions.

  • "The analytical approach will get you a lot of singles and doubles. But the home runs really come from those intuitive calls on how you think the market and the world is going to work and betting in that direction," says Seshan.

• Resource Allocation for New Products:

  • Point: Use a 70:20:10 model to allocate resources between core business, growing bets, and future bets.

  • "70%: Tasks related to the core business. 20%: Working on new bets that have already taken off. 10%: Ideating and working toward future bets," explains Weiss.

• Scaling Teams for New Products:

  • Point: Start with a small team and scale incrementally as you validate customer demand.

  • "I think the first step for a new product organizationally is building a small team. And it's often only three engineers, a PM and a designer, something like that," says Carriero.

• Maintaining Consistent Go-to-Market Strategies:

  • Point: Keep pricing and packaging consistent across your product suite for simplicity and effectiveness.

  • "If you look at Atlassian, whenever they introduce a product to the market, it looks very similar to other products in their portfolio. And what that means is the pricing is similar," says Lionetti.

• Being Prepared to Discontinue Underperforming Products:

  • Point: Be willing to shut down products that aren't contributing significantly to company growth.

  • "We were struggling with the decision of shutting down this product called Carousel, which was a beautiful consumer photo sharing app. It was very popular in some circles and we had a lot of folks working on it, but it wasn't growing in a way that would have moved the needle for the company," says Jackson.

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