One thing I learned from working on a remarkably good team—at Target of all places—is that you can hire great people as long as you can demonstrate (show-not-te

One thing I learned from working on a remarkably good team—at Target of all places—is that you can hire great people as long as you can demonstrate (show-not-tell) that you're doing something different and interesting. How you demonstrate this can take lots of different forms (the whole point is that there is no one way to do this!) but just saying "we have high standards and work hard" is never enough on its own. Everybody says that. You'd think that startups would be the best-positioned organizations to do things differently in the name of hiring. When you start your own company, you don't have to answer to management or HR, and you don't have to follow trends for political reasons. ("We can't let your team do X differently from everybody else, people are going to talk...") But I rarely see this in practice. Most startups seem intent on having a pretty standard approach to management and work; there's clearly some pressure, whether directly from investors or just purely sociological, to be like every other startup.