I also talked with a bunch of people who had worked with him previously, some of whom were references given to me by Marc and some of whom were backchannel. [E

I also talked with a bunch of people who had worked with him previously, some of whom were references given to me by Marc and some of whom were backchannel. [Edited to be less confrontational.] That's reckless and unethical. I'm sorry, but if you make reference calls that aren't provided, you're engaging in the kind of invasive, fratty, white-male-privilege shit that gives Silicon Valley a bad name. It's also why we, in the technology ecosystem, don't have the credibility to get the rest of society to respect us and get some genuinely competent business people (see: Damaso Effect) in our mix. We let immature psychopaths get away with shit, and the rest of the world (rightly) thinks we're all a bunch of sexist, classist, oblivious tools. Also, going beyond the "classic 3", in reference checking, backfires. Average people can provide 3-5 references, but the people who can survive a double-digit, backchannel reference check are mostly the ones who bought references (it's a real thing) and intimidated people into saying good things about them. Somewhere around 6-8, the empirical relationship between the number of references and the quality of candidate actually goes the other way, because you exclude more unlucky good guys than you filter out bad guys (i.e. unethical people you'd want to not hire, and hope to filter out by checking references). The worst of the bad guys almost always have their act together.