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"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us wh

"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs

ackbar03 2y ago
How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on
- meiraleal 2y ago
  You become friends with pretty smart guys that have the potential to become superstars. Which superstar will join a wannabe startup?
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  Either they're the founders or friends thereof or you're struck-by-lightening lucky. Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality it'll be OK.
  - hobs 2y ago
    > try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best. That being said if you pay dollars instead of pennies you can find some decent folks and maybe save some money in the long run :)
    - jll29 2y ago
      > Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best. You don't need the single best, you just should aspire as high a concentration of n * x for n>1 (2x, 10x, ...) as your talent to raiase funding permits. But don't forget it's not all about "best coding"; you want people best in different things (PM, UX, architecture, security, databases, algorithms, compilers, documentation, networking etc. - also depending on what the product is about) - a diverse team of rock stars.
- raziel2p 2y ago
  maybe the superstar idea is somewhat of an illusion, and they are actually just some pretty smart friend of the founder?
  - fwip 2y ago
    Yep. Friends of the founder also get more political/social leverage in the org, so they get more resources to execute their ideas, and their results are valued more highly by leadership.
- maccard 2y ago
  Instead of thinking of them as some superstar, think of it like hiring an IC - you want someone who can, and will ship, especially in the face of ambiguity. If you hire a mega talented engineer who specialises in designing fault tolerant distributed systems, you’re going to build a fault tolerant distributed system. If you hire someone who ships scrappy features and doesn’t leave a giant mess behind you, you have a much better chance of success. Finding those people is the same as finding any other developer.
  - yunohn 2y ago
    I felt like their question was, how to hire them to your new startup over them going to or staying at a big corp.
    - maccard 2y ago
      Those people won’t last at big corp, and won’t be interested in it. As for how you attract them - same way you attract anyone else. Give them something they want. For these people it’s agency, freedom and high level guideposts. For a productive big corp employee it’s clear guidance, timelines and a hierarchy to adhere to.
- breck 2y ago
  > actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? You have to become a superstar first. I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview. I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar designer and salesman. I knew I was not, and had to double down and practice, practice, practice. Craftsmanship comes first. It took those guys decades of practice at their crafts before they founded AirBedAndBreakfast. Think of Paul Graham. Before he created HackerNews and YC, he had already written and published a book on Lisp! A master craftsman. Craftsmanship comes first. If you are not a master at your craft, don't even waste your time trying to recruit superstars. Instead, spend your time on practice.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    Don’t think of people as superstars. Think of them as individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently meet expectations. I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      This only works up to a point, if you lack talent. AFAIK Florence Foster Jenkins spent her whole life taking singing lessons, and this was the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE
      - detourdog 2y ago
        I might agree Florence wasn't paying attention.
    - kragen 2y ago
      'individuals who consistently meet expectations' is not only not the same thing as 'superstars', it's nearly the opposite. doing the unexpected is a defining attribute of superstars. an individual who consistently meets expectations is incapable of simultaneously being a superstar. they must exceed them, and to an astounding degree, to qualify as a 'superstar' by any normal definition of the word many superstars aren't even good at doing the expected when it would be a good idea, often because of drug addictions this happens for two reasons. one is that if you're selecting people along two axes, the more harshly you select on one axis, the less candidates remain to select along the other, unless the axes are perfectly correlated. the other is that, whether you're a candidate selecting strategies or a judge selecting candidates, two axes along which you can select are mean and variance. in any event where you take the best of multiple trials, the top performers will almost always have high variance, not just a high mean
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  It's easy. They all happen to live in SF and be working on a YC start-up... /s
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  How many startups actually need superstars? Most of them are doing glorified CRUD work. There’s nothing wrong with that! But companies should be honest with themselves about what they need. Everyone still seems obsessed with being able to pretend they somehow got the absolute best deal on the employment market instead of interviewing for the position itself.
lwansbrough 2y ago
But then you hear about stories of employees coming to Steve’s office to give a presentation about how such and such technology isn’t possible, then Steve says yes it is figure it out, and they do.
- atulatul 2y ago
  "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!" https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  That's a case of an employee telling what not to do
Aurornis 2y ago
The problem with Steve Jobs advice like this is that it doesn’t work out of context. I worked for a VP and CTO who embraced this advice literally: They wanted to hire smart people and have them decide what would be done. They took it to so much of an extreme that they washed their hands of the responsibility for deciding and executing anything. Their job, they thought, was to call us to meetings and then ask a lot of questions about what we were going to do. The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted. Instead, it was never-ending circles of Socratic method questions: What do you need to succeed? How will your team accomplish that? Who can you talk to make that happen? Whenever we tried to make it clear that we needed them to do some work in the organization, we got a lecture about learning how to be self sufficient and get things done ourselves. Not surprisingly, little got done. We wrote the software fine, but any time we encountered issues that required VP or C-level collaboration we hit a wall. You can only defer to IC employees to tell you what to do for so long. Beyond that point it’s just laziness. This is also a stark contrast to how Steve Jobs actually operated, which by all accounts was extremely demanding, dismissive, and command-and-control with him at the center.
- highfrequency 2y ago
  Great comment, curious to hear more about your perspective. > The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted. Would it be fair to diagnose this as an issue where the tech side of the business ran in an open, proactive way but other departments had a top-down mentality that required interfacing with the head of your department? In other words - do you think it is a necessary/desirable feature that ICs need organizational authority from the CTO to push major changes? I get that given how the rest of the org functioned, it would have been much better to have more top-down mentality from the CTO. But is there a better equilibrium where this is not required?
jayd16 2y ago
Delegation is great but you need to win the culture war. You need alignment, and passion for the same goals or else it doesn't matter how good the people are.
gist 2y ago
Wonderful but almost all startups don't have a cultural icon (and btw he was one way back after Apple got started and obviously when he returned) nor do they have the resources to 'hire great people' and fire anyone and replace them.
aforty 2y ago
I guess what this blog post is about is that it only works if you have the ability to instinctively tell who those people are. Steve did and I know a few other people personally who do but I sure as hell don’t.

ackbar03 2y ago

How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on

meiraleal 2y ago
You become friends with pretty smart guys that have the potential to become superstars. Which superstar will join a wannabe startup?
JonChesterfield 2y ago
Either they're the founders or friends thereof or you're struck-by-lightening lucky. Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality it'll be OK.
- hobs 2y ago
  > try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best. That being said if you pay dollars instead of pennies you can find some decent folks and maybe save some money in the long run :)
  - jll29 2y ago
    > Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best. You don't need the single best, you just should aspire as high a concentration of n * x for n>1 (2x, 10x, ...) as your talent to raiase funding permits. But don't forget it's not all about "best coding"; you want people best in different things (PM, UX, architecture, security, databases, algorithms, compilers, documentation, networking etc. - also depending on what the product is about) - a diverse team of rock stars.
raziel2p 2y ago
maybe the superstar idea is somewhat of an illusion, and they are actually just some pretty smart friend of the founder?
- fwip 2y ago
  Yep. Friends of the founder also get more political/social leverage in the org, so they get more resources to execute their ideas, and their results are valued more highly by leadership.
maccard 2y ago
Instead of thinking of them as some superstar, think of it like hiring an IC - you want someone who can, and will ship, especially in the face of ambiguity. If you hire a mega talented engineer who specialises in designing fault tolerant distributed systems, you’re going to build a fault tolerant distributed system. If you hire someone who ships scrappy features and doesn’t leave a giant mess behind you, you have a much better chance of success. Finding those people is the same as finding any other developer.
- yunohn 2y ago
  I felt like their question was, how to hire them to your new startup over them going to or staying at a big corp.
  - maccard 2y ago
    Those people won’t last at big corp, and won’t be interested in it. As for how you attract them - same way you attract anyone else. Give them something they want. For these people it’s agency, freedom and high level guideposts. For a productive big corp employee it’s clear guidance, timelines and a hierarchy to adhere to.
breck 2y ago
> actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? You have to become a superstar first. I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview. I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar designer and salesman. I knew I was not, and had to double down and practice, practice, practice. Craftsmanship comes first. It took those guys decades of practice at their crafts before they founded AirBedAndBreakfast. Think of Paul Graham. Before he created HackerNews and YC, he had already written and published a book on Lisp! A master craftsman. Craftsmanship comes first. If you are not a master at your craft, don't even waste your time trying to recruit superstars. Instead, spend your time on practice.
- detourdog 2y ago
  Don’t think of people as superstars. Think of them as individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently meet expectations. I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    This only works up to a point, if you lack talent. AFAIK Florence Foster Jenkins spent her whole life taking singing lessons, and this was the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ubiUIxbWE
    - detourdog 2y ago
      I might agree Florence wasn't paying attention.
  - kragen 2y ago
    'individuals who consistently meet expectations' is not only not the same thing as 'superstars', it's nearly the opposite. doing the unexpected is a defining attribute of superstars. an individual who consistently meets expectations is incapable of simultaneously being a superstar. they must exceed them, and to an astounding degree, to qualify as a 'superstar' by any normal definition of the word many superstars aren't even good at doing the expected when it would be a good idea, often because of drug addictions this happens for two reasons. one is that if you're selecting people along two axes, the more harshly you select on one axis, the less candidates remain to select along the other, unless the axes are perfectly correlated. the other is that, whether you're a candidate selecting strategies or a judge selecting candidates, two axes along which you can select are mean and variance. in any event where you take the best of multiple trials, the top performers will almost always have high variance, not just a high mean
philipwhiuk 2y ago
It's easy. They all happen to live in SF and be working on a YC start-up... /s
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
How many startups actually need superstars? Most of them are doing glorified CRUD work. There’s nothing wrong with that! But companies should be honest with themselves about what they need. Everyone still seems obsessed with being able to pretend they somehow got the absolute best deal on the employment market instead of interviewing for the position itself.

lwansbrough 2y ago

But then you hear about stories of employees coming to Steve’s office to give a presentation about how such and such technology isn’t possible, then Steve says yes it is figure it out, and they do.

atulatul 2y ago
"Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!" https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
spencerchubb 2y ago
That's a case of an employee telling what not to do

Aurornis 2y ago

The problem with Steve Jobs advice like this is that it doesn’t work out of context. I worked for a VP and CTO who embraced this advice literally: They wanted to hire smart people and have them decide what would be done. They took it to so much of an extreme that they washed their hands of the responsibility for deciding and executing anything. Their job, they thought, was to call us to meetings and then ask a lot of questions about what we were going to do. The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted. Instead, it was never-ending circles of Socratic method questions: What do you need to succeed? How will your team accomplish that? Who can you talk to make that happen? Whenever we tried to make it clear that we needed them to do some work in the organization, we got a lecture about learning how to be self sufficient and get things done ourselves. Not surprisingly, little got done. We wrote the software fine, but any time we encountered issues that required VP or C-level collaboration we hit a wall. You can only defer to IC employees to tell you what to do for so long. Beyond that point it’s just laziness. This is also a stark contrast to how Steve Jobs actually operated, which by all accounts was extremely demanding, dismissive, and command-and-control with him at the center.

highfrequency 2y ago
Great comment, curious to hear more about your perspective. > The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted. Would it be fair to diagnose this as an issue where the tech side of the business ran in an open, proactive way but other departments had a top-down mentality that required interfacing with the head of your department? In other words - do you think it is a necessary/desirable feature that ICs need organizational authority from the CTO to push major changes? I get that given how the rest of the org functioned, it would have been much better to have more top-down mentality from the CTO. But is there a better equilibrium where this is not required?

jayd16 2y ago

Delegation is great but you need to win the culture war. You need alignment, and passion for the same goals or else it doesn't matter how good the people are.

gist 2y ago

Wonderful but almost all startups don't have a cultural icon (and btw he was one way back after Apple got started and obviously when he returned) nor do they have the resources to 'hire great people' and fire anyone and replace them.

aforty 2y ago

I guess what this blog post is about is that it only works if you have the ability to instinctively tell who those people are. Steve did and I know a few other people personally who do but I sure as hell don’t.