paul graham

“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking

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I’ve never been good at “hot takes”. Anyone who knows anything about marketing can tell you that the best time to share your opinion about something is when everyone is all worked up about it. Hot topics drive clicks and eyeballs and attention en masse.

Unfortunately, my internal combustion engine doesn’t run that way. If anything, my fuel runs the other way. If everybody’s already buzzing about something, I feel like chances are, everything that needs to be said is already being said by someone else, so why should I bother?

Earlier this year I started writing a piece on why “hire great people and get out of their way” is such terrible, dangerous, counterproductive advice to give anyone in a leadership role. Then Paul Graham dropped his famous essay on “founder mode”, inspired by a talk given at a YC event by Brian Chesky. PG called it “a talk everyone who was there will remember…Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they’d ever heard.” The internet went nuts for it.

What I should have done: put my head down and finished the fucking piece. 🙄

What I actually did: ragetweeted a long thread from bed, read a bunch of other people’s takes, then went “well, all the bases seem to be covered” and lost all interest in finishing.

For the curious, here are the takes I really liked:

A month and a half later, we all got to see what the fuss was about. Keith Rabois interviewed Brian Chesky at a Khosla Ventures event in NYC and posted the ensuing 45 min video to YouTube, calling it “Founder Mode and the Art of Hiring”.

The gripping tale of Airbnb’s dramatic rise, crash, and rebirth

Chesky starts off by relating a story about how Airbnb in its early years hired way too many people, way too fast, and buckled under all the nasty consequences of hypergrowth. Lack of clarity and direction, excessive coordination costs, lack of focus, layers of bureaucracy that added no value or expertise, empire building, you name it. 

So it’s 2019, and it’s just starting to dawn on Brian Chesky that he has this massive clusterfuck on his hands. But Airbnb is barrelling towards an IPO, so he feels like his hands are tied. Then COVID hits. Airbnb loses 80% of its business in 8 weeks, going from “the hottest IPO since Uber” to facing possible bankruptcy and dissolution, practically overnight. You never want to let a crisis go to waste, so Chesky seizes the opportunity to restructure the company and make a bunch of massive changes.

This is a fascinating story, right? It is! Or it should be. A young, first-time founder hits it big with his first startup, barrels through a decade of hypergrowth and free money towards a white hot IPO, then belatedly realizes everything he’s done has resulted in a big, bloated, horrendously inefficient company where nobody can get shit done and all the top talent is leaving. Then comes the pandemic. Holy shit! How will he turn things around??

This is an incredible story. I want to hear this story. 

The problem is that he somehow manages to tell it in the most aggravating possible way, where he is a lone hero, buffeted by mediocrity and held back by his own employees at every turn. Actual quote:

“Oh my god, I guess I’m not crazy. I’m just made to believe I’m crazy by my own employees. You’re not crazy. Even though people who work for you tell you you are. You’re not crazy.” 

He talks about the people who worked for him in supremely belittling terms — “C players”, “incapable”, “mediocre”, “worst people”. And he takes absolutely zero responsibility for the corporate disaster that developed in slow motion under his watch, while taking ALL the credit for its recovery.

How might another person have told this story?

I mean…if it was me, I might have started off by confessing that “Wow, I did not do a good job as CEO for the first decade of running my company. I over-hired, underspecified the roles, did a terrible job of setting expectations and rewarding the skills and behaviors that really mattered, didn’t know what org charts were for, and in general just completely failed to build a company that valued efficiency, or had any kind of effective strategy or culture of high performance”.

If Brian Chesky had done that I would have been like, “THIS MAN IS A HERO, EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND COME HEAR HIS HARD WON WISDOM”. Instead, the way he tells the story, the problem is always everyone else, and the solution is always more Brian Chesky.

But Brian Chesky created the fucking problems, by being bad at running the business! 

There is actually no shame in this! He is right: being a CEO is fucking hard. It does not come naturally. Nobody is born good at it. It takes a lot of hard work and pain and suffering to become someone who is good at running a company. I was CEO of Honeycomb for 3.5 years, and it almost killed me. I never got good at it. I have immense respect for the people who do it well.

But this attitude he has, where the buck stops literally everywhere but him — is one I find so fucking repellent. Ethics aside, I also feel like it constitutes a material risk to any company when the CEO is so lacking in humility and self-awareness. (I can leave room for the possibility that he is actually humble as fuck and he just…chose not to share those reflections with us in this talk. 🤷)

It took me a month to make it through the entire recording

I’ll be honest, I made it about three minutes into the video before I blew my fucking top and closed the tab. It made me so angry. This fucking guy. It pushes all my buttons.

But then I had a few conversations with other founders who did watch the whole thing, people I genuinely respect. I kept hearing there was great advice in the piece, if you can just get past the attitude and total lack of accountability.

It took me over a month to make it through the full thing, in fits and starts, but once I finally did, I had to admit that they were right. There is good advice inside, and there are reasonable principles embedded in this talk. Chesky seems to have successfully turned his company around, after all. That’s a really hard thing to do!

In the end, I forced myself to buckle down and get this piece out because … between PG’s “founder mode” essay and the wide distribution of the Chesky interview, these opinions have already imprinted onto generations of Silicon Valley founders and leaders. They have seeped into the water table, and there’s no going back.

I would PREFER the enduring legacy of both “founder mode” and Brian Chesky’s “The Art of Hiring” to be one that moves the industry forward in material ways, and not one that further entrenches the Silicon Valley cult of the founder, Great Man of History, 10x engineer Lone Ranger superhero John Galt type bullshit that has dogged our heels for decades. And there is some decent material here! We can work with this.

So let’s take the major points he makes, one at a time, and mine them for gold nuggets. Here we go!

The story, in Brian Chesky’s words

My apologies for the extremely long quotes, but I think they set the stage well. (Lightly edited for readability.)

“You know, we were one of the first ‘unicorns’, before that was a term. And it was amazing for a bit, from like 2009-2014. It was awesome. It was fun. It was exciting. And then one day it was horrible. And that day went on for like six years (emphasis mine). And basically what happened was I realized you can kind of be born a good founder…I think I was a pretty good founder the day we started the company…But I’m not sure any of us are born good CEOs.

But the other problem with being a CEO is I think almost all the advice and everything they teach at like Harvard Business School…is wrong. For example, the role of a great leader is to hire great people and empower them to do their job…If you do that, your company will be destroyed.”

I’ve never been to Harvard Business School, but I would be pretty surprised to learn that they don’t cover things like organizational structure, span of control, or operational efficiency.

We had a company where we were like a matrix organization. And so like we had all these different teams. And by the way, there’s no governor of how many teams there are. So teams can create teams, can create sub teams, can create sub teams, that people can decide how many manager levels they create. Like if you’re not careful people do this. And why do they do this? Because they want to have new teams.”

(The “governor of how many teams there are” is whoever leads your People team or HR, btw, who in turn rolls up to the CEO. Again, org design is a pretty traditional and well-studied aspect of operating a company.)

So let’s take a marketing or creative department. There’s a team in Airbnb doing graphics and different parts of the site need graphics, advertising needs graphics. And when it was five teams, the five teams would ask the graphics department for graphics and they’d have like five requests. And then pretty soon it’s 20 teams and once it’s 20 teams…they’re like the deli, there’s a line out the block, there’s a multi-month wait. And then what happens is the graphics team, the central service, kind of like gives up and everything seems pointless. And the teams waiting forever give up and they say, ‘give me my own people’. So now they get their own graphics team. So now you have 5 or 10 graphics teams. And you can do the same thing with technology. And product. Oh, you can have 10 data teams that have different metrics and we can go down the list. 

So now you have 10 divisions. Now those 10 divisions are wanting to go in different directions. And they have general managers. And GMs are like little Russian babushka dolls. They want to create miniature GMs and miniature-miniature GMs. And so now you don’t have 10 teams, you’ve got actually 100 teams, because you’ve got these little babushkas running around and they’re going in 100 directions with different technology…

You end up with a lot of bureaucracy. You end up with a company where there’s meetings about meetings where metrics and strategic priorities are the only thing that bind the company together. There’s no cohesive product roadmap, everything is a different time horizon. It’s all short term oriented. And the biggest problem of all is a CEO gets separated from their own product.

And I noticed this thing where there was more bureaucracy, there were these divisions, the divisions then they have to advocate for resources. That advocacy creates politics. And then you have a situation where it’s hard to track what everyone’s doing. So you have like this free for all. There’s not a lot of accountability, which leads to complacency. The complacency means that, like the bad people, the good people are indistinguishable. So the good people tend to move on. They say the company’s changed, the company slows down, and one day you wake up.

Sounds like a mess, all right.

(Chesky’s use of the passive voice here is truly spectacular. Who was in charge for those horrible six years while all this organizational fuckery and uncontrolled sprawl was happening? Oh right, you were.)

To sum up: before the pandemic, Airbnb seems to have had multiple business divisions, each of which had its own GM and a whole ass org structure, with its own engineering, design, marketing teams, etc. This seems wildly weird and inefficient and crazy to me, given that Airbnb only has one product, which is Airbnb? But, they did. So yeah, I am unsurprised that this did not work well.

Which brings us to our first lesson on efficiency.

You should have as few employees as possible

“So what did I do? The first thing I did is I went from a divisional structure to a functional organization. Functional organizations are when you have design and engineering and product management or product marketing and sales. So we went back to a functional organization where our goal was to have as few employees as possible…We said we were the Navy Seals, not the Navy. We want a small, lean, elite, highly skilled team, not a team of kind of mid-level battalion type people. And the reason why is that every person brings with them a communication tax.” 

Basically, Brian Chesky is rediscovering this graphic and it’s blowing his mind.

Brooks’ Law

I feel like this should be really fucking obvious, but I guess the legacy of hypergrowth companies proves that it is not: You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options. Doing great things with a small team is always something to brag about.

(Okay…maybe not ALWAYS-always. There are some business models where your revenue scales linearly along with headcount, but for your average VC-funded technology startup, “we want a small, lean, elite, highly skilled team” is like saying “you should eat vegetables”.)

Your managers should be subject matter experts

“Oh and by the way, you have leaders that are, quote, managers. I don’t like managers. We don’t have a single manager at Airbnb. And I put that in air quotes. A manager that doesn’t know how to do the job is like a cavalry general that can’t ride a horse. A lot of companies do that. So we only allowed managers that were experts but for a long time we had managers. And one day I woke up and I realized I had 50 year olds, managing 40 year olds, managing 30 year olds, managing interns, doing the job with all these layers that weren’t adding any value.”

The disgust in his voice when he says the word “managers” is palpable. And it’s gross. You can talk about the importance of managers being highly skilled in their domain — and I have, many times! — without treating people with contempt, or disparaging them in public for performing the exact jobs that, again, your own company defined and hired them to do, and they faithfully did, for years.

The moral of the story is valid. The tone is unwarranted and disrespectful (and the whiff of ageism is just the rotten little cherry on top).

As for his claim that “A lot of companies do that” — hire managers that aren’t experts in their field, who just do pure people management — no? Maybe? Not that I’m aware of, not in the past decade. Citation needed.

You don’t manage people, you manage people through the work

“I got rid of all quote managers or they left the company and we said you can only manage the function if you’re an expert. So like the head of design has to actually manage the work first. You don’t manage people. You manage people through the work. I learned this from Johnny Ive because most heads of design, at most tech companies don’t actually manage design. They manage the people. Johnny Ive would say no, my main job is to manage the work and I build a team and we design together. But I’m mostly looking at the work. I’m not like having career conversations all day long. That’s crazy.”

Again, I’m not sure where he gets this idea that at “most tech companies”, the head of design is just like…hired from Starbucks or something for their people management skills? So mystifying.

“The best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people”

“The reason there’s too many meetings in a company isn’t because they don’t have no-meeting Wednesdays, it’s because they have too many people. People create meetings, and the best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people. There’s no other better way to do that (emphasis mine).”

Um…it might be a mistake to read this too literally, but this is a really stupid thing to say. People do incur coordination costs, but just to be clear, there are lots of ways to get rid of meetings, no matter how many people you do or don’t have, and you should absolutely be investing in some of them in an ongoing way. For example,

  • Develop a rich written culture and rituals around async work
  • Make recordings available, use AI transcription and summaries, or take notes and send them around
  • Use calendar plugins to visualize where your time is going, or even automatically reschedule meetings to compact your calendar and create blocks of focus time (e.g. Clockwise)
  • Declare calendar bankruptcy for meetings with >3 people every quarter, like Spotify does
  • Use ‘optional’ invites to be clear whether you’re inviting someone because you need them there vs for awareness purposes, or because you think they might be interested
  • Simply remind people that they own their calendar, and it’s okay to decline!

Synchronous meetings are one of many, many ways to coordinate between people and groups. There are others. Explore and experiment.

Maybe don’t call your employees “C players”, “incapable people” or “non world class”

“So you end up with this situation where non world class people, you know the old saying ‘A players hire A players, B players hire C players’, I would like to amend it. B players hire LOTS of C players, not just a few but a lot, because those are the kind of people that like building empires. If you can’t capably do your job, you don’t hire people better than you, and a person less capable than you can’t do the job. 

So you need three incapable people because one incapable person can’t actually do all the work. But now three incapable people are just going in three different directions, creating all these meetings and all this administrative tax.”

Deep breaths.

Ok. My goal for this piece is NOT to spend the whole time complaining about Brian Chesky and his lack of accountability, empathy, or respect (or as a friend of mine put it: “I am prepared to argue that he has no theory of mind for any actor at the company that is not the CEO. The search for the deep truth can stop, Brian doesn’t actually know what people are.”)

I want to invest my own limited time and energy into plucking out the bits of advice he gives that are solid, practical, and actionable, so I can contextualize and expound upon them. 

With that in mind, let’s skip right past the insults and acknowledge the fact that there are real challenges here. It’s extremely difficult to evaluate people who are more skilled than you are in the interview process, and harder still to evaluate those who are skilled in a different domain. Developing these muscles as an organization, figuring out what excellence looks like for each level in each role, maintaining a high bar of quality and employee-role fit…these are investments, and they take time and attention.

Constraints fuel creativity. Constraints also fuel efficiency. One of the biggest pathologies of hypergrowth is that when money is free, and everybody is telling you to go go go, grow grow grow! discipline tends to fly out the window. These things are hard to do well even under the best of circumstances; when everyone’s being given unlimited budgets and told to hire their way out of their backlog, well, can you blame them for doing exactly as they’ve been told?

Pretty shitty to retroactively decide they were all losers, if you ask me.

Great leadership is presence, not absence

“Founder mode at its core, though, is about the single principle to be in the details. Great leadership is presence, not absence. So to go back to my lesson, it is not good for you to hire great people and trust them to do their job. How do you know if they’re doing a good job if you’re not in the details?

You should start in the details. And no one does this (emphasis mine). Everyone hires executives and they let them do their thing, and then they find out a year later, the whole thing has been wrong. They’ve hired people they shouldn’t have hired. Now you got to get in the details. And of course, now their confidence goes down. They always inevitably leave the company. And you should actually start in the details, develop trust, develop muscle memory and then let go. So great leadership is presence not absence.”

A-fucking-men.

…Except for the one small fact that Chesky keeps repeating, “no one does this”. My dude, everyone does this. Nobody just hires an executive and sets them loose and doesn’t look over their shoulder for a year. What the flying fuck? That is lunacy. I love that you are discovering basic leadership principles and it is just fucking flooring you, but have you ever cracked a book about management, or talked to another leader? Ever?

Christine and I learned a long time ago not to tell our execs, “I’m not going to tell you how to run your org.” The goal is to do the work to be in alignment so that you don’t have to tell someone how to run their org, because you have a shared idea of what “great” looks like — and what “good enough” looks like — and you can catch deviations early, while they’re easy enough to fix.

Great leadership is presence, not absence; agreed, absolutely. But what does that mean exactly? Fortunately, he’s about to tell us.

“I review every single thing in the company. If I don’t review it, it doesn’t ship.”

“There was this paradox of CEO involvement. The less involved I got in a project, the more dysfunctional it got; the more dysfunctional it got, the more people assumed the dysfunction came from leadership…And then it would get so screwed up, then I would get involved. So what I ended up doing, I took a playbook of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk does this, Jensen Huang does this, Walt Disney does this, all of them do this. (emphasis mine) 

If the CEO is the chief product officer in the company, then you should review all of the work. So I review every single thing in the company. If I don’t review it, it doesn’t ship. I review everything on a cadence…If you’re not actually good at product, you don’t have good judgment and you’re not a super skilled product leader, then maybe you shouldn’t be CEO of the company, I don’t know. So let’s assume you’re actually good at what you do, then I think you should review all the work.”

Whuf.

Let’s back up a second. Brian Chesky has led Airbnb on an incredible journey over the past 17 years — from idea to startup to bloated, sprawling post-unicorn behemoth; through a near-death experience, restructuring and IPO; and emerged on the other side of it all as a public company with a share price of $130. He didn’t do this alone (I really loathe the trope where we treat companies like the extension and embodiment of one man’s will to power), but this also doesn’t happen by accident or happenstance.

He deserves credit for this. It’s more than I’ve done! Who cares what I have to say about any of this, really? I don’t have the same degree of believability as Brian Chesky when it comes to how to build a resilient, enduring, high-quality product company.

So let’s listen to someone who does have believability. Here’s what Reed Hastings says in “No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention” (share price: $921):

“There’s a whole mythology about CEOs and other senior leaders who are so involved in the details of the business that their product or service becomes amazing. The legend of Steve Jobs was that his micromanagement made the iPhone a great product…Of course, at most companies, even at those who have leaders who don’t micromanage, employees seek to make the decision the boss is most likely to support.

We don’t emulate those top-down models, because we believe we are fastest and most innovative when employees throughout the company make and own decisions. At Netflix, we strive to develop good decision-making muscles everywhere in our company — and we pride ourselves on how few decisions senior management makes (emphasis mine).”

His co-author, Erin Meyer, chimes in:

“People desire and thrive on jobs that give them control over their own decisions. Since the 1980s, management literature has been filled with instructions for how to delegate more and ‘empower employees to empower themselves’…The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work.”

OMG, confusing!! Evidently ALL of them do NOT do it. What even IS the moral of the story here?! Well…it’s not a simple one, unfortunately. It turns out that you can’t just copy what Brian Chesky did at Airbnb, or what Reed Hastings did at Netflix, and paste it into your company and expect the same results. Bummer!

There are many paths up the mountain

This is an architecture problem. The Chesky/Airbnb architecture is like a monolith application, or a single-threaded process. Everything goes through the CEO, and that’s how they maintain quality. The Hastings/Netflix architecture is more like a microservices application or a threaded, highly concurrent process.

Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.

Your architecture will only work if it solves for your problems, utilizing your resources, values, and contingencies. It needs to be authentic, consistent, and internally coherent. This doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from either of these companies. You can — I have! But you should probably treat them like reference architectures — just-so stories about how individual cultures have successfully evolved in response to their unique challenges and threats, not recipe books.

And I can tell you right away that as an employee, one of these models looks a whole hell of a lot more appealing than the other.

But wait — it gets worse. 😅

Should the CEO interview every candidate?

“I interviewed the first 400 people and I wish I interviewed longer. Maybe my biggest regret is not interviewing the first thousand. I think you should interview every candidate until the recruiting team stages an intervention. Once they stage an intervention, you should interview for two more years after that until everyone threatens to resign…and then you should step away.”

Well. If this is the kind of company you’re choosing to build, then I suppose you may as well be consistent.

Can you be calibrated as an interviewer on every single opening, for every role? My God, no, not even close. 

The thing is…I have talked to so many people who work at companies where the CEO insists on interviewing every candidate. It seems to be a trend that is gaining steam rather than losing steam, much to everyone’s misfortune.

Which means that I have personally heard so many anguished stories from angry, frustrated engineering managers who have had their decisions overturned by arrogant CEOs who lacked the skills to evaluate their candidate’s experience, who were biased in blatant and embarrassing ways, who were so fucking overconfident in their own judgment that their teams are constantly having to compensate and apologize and mop up after them.

Want an example? Sure. I recently heard from a director at a 500-person company who spent six months cultivating and recruiting an exceptional hire with an unusual skill set. The candidate made it through their interview loop with flying colors, only for the CEO to reject them because they had recently had a child and were forthright about the fact that work/life balance was a meaningful consideration for them at this point in time. (The director did their best to do damage control, but even though the CEO ultimately relented, the candidate was no longer willing to leave their job. Can you blame them?!?)

It keeps getting worse! Here comes the low point.

“If they would come work for you, they’re not good enough. They’re only good enough if they come to work for me.”

“Can I give you an example of what I do today that no one else, not no one but maybe 95% of public company CEOs don’t do. I have an executive team, right?…I have like seven execs and 40 or 50 VPs. All the directs to my directs dual report to me. I am the co-hiring manager of all the directs to my directs and so we meet and I often tell my directs, ‘I don’t want somebody that you could hire without me. If they would come to work for you, they’re not good enough. They’re only good enough if they come to work for me. So if you can hire them without my help, they’re not good enough.’”

I just about lost my shit over this. Do you hear yourself, bud? 

The irony is…I am actually the world’s hugest proponent of skip level 1x1s. I have two or three half-written blog posts in my drafts folder preaching the value of skip levels. I’ve written MULTIPLE twitter threads over the years, talking about how important it is to build relationships with your manager’s managers and your direct reports’ direct reports. 

I’ve said that I think skip levels are like end-to-end health checks. It’s important to open a line of communication and explicitly invite critical feedback and bad news. It’s a way to verify that managers are doing a good job managing their teams. It’s how you help iron out telephone games and ensure packets are being transmitted and received up and down the org chart. They are such a critical contribution to organizational health and clear communications, and not enough places invest in them.

I’m also a big proponent of promoting from within, of hiring ambitious people — all of it. 

But this attitude towards hierarchy that locates the CEO at the center of every universe, and ranks people in importance according to their proximity…it’s just gross. It’s an attitude that’s contagious; it spreads, like syphilis. And I do not think it unlocks intrinsic motivation or excellence in most humans. It mostly incentivizes a bunch of maladaptive behaviors like sucking up to the CEO.

UGH. Okay, this is getting really long. I’m going to jump rapid-fire through a few final nuggets.

Executive hiring fails when you hire someone at the wrong stage

“Probably the number one reason executive hiring fails is because you hire somebody at the wrong stage. And they were managing instead of building, and you didn’t know that. And so you brought in a manager who is an expert or not so expert, but comfortable in a highly political bureaucracy. And now they have to do things themselves and they can’t. They also have the wrong stage instinct, right? Maybe a CMO used to run $500 million marketing budgets. Now they have a $50 million or $5 million budget, and they don’t know what to do and they can’t do anything themselves.”

Yes, execs can fail because they are managing instead of building, but they can ALSO fail because they are building instead of managing. I’ve worked with execs who operated like they were effectively the most senior IC in the room, and they had…extreme limitations as leaders, let’s put it that way.

Overall, this is a solid point. Being a CMO that takes a company from $1-10m or $10-$50m is a very, very different skill set than taking a company from $50 to $250m, or through an IPO.

We look for executives who can both scale up and scale down. Scale up: you can speak credibly to the board, at the right level of abstraction vs detail, you can craft strategy, see around corners etc. Scale down: you know what “good” looks like for work all over your organization, you can get down in the weeds to help coach a struggling IC back to victory, you can debug a flailing campaign or workflow. Both matter.

References are critical for building confidence in your hires

“I actually prioritize references over interviewing…Andreeson Horowitz would tell me, you should do 8 hours of reference checks per employee.”

Agreed. I’ve said many times that if I had to choose between interviews or references, I would pick references every time. (Fortunately, you don’t have to pick!)

“Ask them who the best people are. Say, ‘okay, separate from this topic, I just want to know who’s the best person you’ve ever worked with.’ Do they say the person’s name you just talked about?”

This trick doesn’t fool anybody.

“Then you ask questions like, okay, what do I need to watch out for? If I were to hire them? What is the one area of development you would give them?”

This is good advice. You should always probe into people’s weaknesses and areas of development. Everyone has them, there’s no shame in that. Hearing details about where they are weak can give you confidence, and set you up better to support them. It gives you richer insight into them as a person and coworker.

A basket of interviewing tips and tricks

“Interviewing. My first tip is you ask follow up questions. You ask them how to explain how they did something. And the key is to ask two followups. You never want to get the first answer, you always want the third answer.”

Asking follow-up questions is a classic technique, and a good one. But don’t let them dominate the conversation with a narrative. You want to be intentional about pulling on specific threads and making sure they answer what you asked, not pull a politician’s move and give the answer they feel like answering. Does the answer sound canned, or are they thinking on their feet?

“Often there’s too many people interviewing for too short a time, not going deep enough. Your interview panel should be as few people as possible, going as deep as possible…3 or 4 people going really deep is better than 8 or 10 people giving you their first impression…and they’re actually mostly thinking about what this means for them.”

Yeah, so this is an area where my thinking has actually changed a lot over the years. I used to cast a much wider net, like I felt like people ought to get to interview anyone who was being hired over them. I’ve come to realize that having too many veto points in the system is dangerous and doesn’t actually add more value. Yes, people like being offered the opportunity to affirmatively vet someone, but at a certain point you have to prioritize the candidate experience — and trust your team to make good choices.

It’s usually better to have a fewer number of interviewers, but make sure they are all well calibrated for the role, and that there’s a certain amount of coordination between interviewers so everyone is covering different questions/aspects of the role. If you have 8 or 10 interviewers, that is way, way too many.

“Every potential hire is guilty until proven innocent. It is the opposite of our justice system. Most people, when they interview, they look for the absence of weaknesses and that is innocence. The presumption is someone’s good. You should always presume somebody is not good. You need proof. They don’t work for you. So you need evidence to hire them, not evidence to eliminate them as a candidate and almost every company gets this wrong. And what they end up doing is hiring mediocre people with an absence of weaknesses, not people that have a preponderance of evidence of being really good and spike in a few areas.”

Again, there is a solid principle buried deep under all this repugnant bullshit about “mediocre people” and “guilty until proven innocent”. Here’s how I would put it: you want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. If they’re strong where you need them to be strong, it’s okay if they aren’t equally superpowered at everything — that’s why we build teams, to supplement and balance each other out.

In the Honeycomb interview process, we emphasize that we want to see you at your best — please help us do that! If you don’t feel like we’ve seen your strengths, please tell us, so we can fix it. 

See, how hard was that? Same point, zero jackassery.

There is no such thing as the ‘best people’

Another way to look at it is the quality of the people. People never hire people better than them. So there might be people that are good at their job, but it’s not enough to be good at your job in most large companies. If you are the best in the world at your job, but you can’t hire really great people, then you’re not going to be the best in the world because your team isn’t really good. 

God, he does this over and over again, talking about people like they exist on some index you can stack rank or something.

Here’s one small mental hack that makes a world of difference: remember that you are trying to hire the right people to join your team/org/company.

Not the “best” people. 

The right people.

The fact that someone isn’t a superstar employee for this company, this product, this team, at this stage, doesn’t mean they might not be a superstar employee for someone else. And people who aren’t “superstar employees” are still worthy of your respect. Not wanting to work your ass off is a perfectly legitimate life choice and does not make them a lower quality human. Maybe they aren’t the right hire for you, but you don’t have to treat them — or talk about them — like shit.

People who work for big, stable companies, are not necessarily bad at their job or incapable of building things. They have a different skill set, they may work at a different tempo, but this doesn’t mean they suck. My god. So fucking condescending.

There’s such a special kind of hubris in these startup kids who are losing tens of millions of dollars a year and looking down their noses at their peers in organizations that are making tens of millions of dollars a year, believing themselves to be categorically better than them just because they can…prototype real fast? Unclear.

Building a world-class team is about more than just hiring

I wrote a piece a few years ago called “The Real 11 Reasons I Don’t Hire You”, where I discussed a few of the many variables that go into deciding who to hire. It’s complicated — it is irreducibly complicated. And it should be.

But it’s also just the beginning. The team, the culture, the sociotechnical systems you hire them into are going to exert a gravitational pull over all of the people you hire. Are you bringing them into an environment that is generative, playful, creative, experimental, intense, competitive, demoralizing, controlling, grinding, aspirational, compliant, hierarchical, passive-aggressive, or aggressive-aggressive? Are standards applied consistently? What behaviors get rewarded or punished, actively or otherwise? Who gets mentored and fast tracked to the top? Who gets the most facetime with the CEO? Is CEO facetime a prized currency? Why? Systems drive behavior.

Sociologists have a term for the cognitive bias that causes us to predictably, consistently over-emphasize individual agency and attributes and underestimate situational factors: the FAE, or Fundamental Attribution Error. This whole interview is sopping with FAE energy.

It’s not as simple as “just hire great people”. You want to hire people who share your values, want to do the job, have the right skills, are motivated, etc, and then the conditions you create for them to work under will either cause them to flourish and feed their creativity and drive, or will crush them and shut them down. The feedback loop runs both ways.

Hypergrowth is hazardous to your company’s health

“In a hypergrowth company, it could even be 50% of your time is hiring.”

Chesky mentions hypergrowth only once and briefly, towards the end, but it’s a vital piece of context if you want to understand the Airbnb story.

As he says, Airbnb was one of the O.G. unicorns — a unicorn before they coined the term ‘unicorn’. It was born in the era of hypergrowth and free money. That’s the only way to make any sense of the fact that a company could pay such comically little attention to efficiency, for so long. (Thirteen years, to be exact.)

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In hypergrowth mode, you solve every problem by throwing more resources at the system. The tools you learn are weird ones, which map awkwardly to the skills you need to run a normal, sustainable company that’s expected to turn a profit. Hypergrowth encourages a raft of bad habits, and attacking every problem by hiring more people is one of them.

This is not good for anyone, except perhaps venture capitalists. The externalities are dreadful. It’s impossible to scale your culture, your practices, your values, or people’s expectations at an equivalent pace. The correction is brutal, when the time finally comes to worry about efficiency — and eventually, everybody needs to worry about efficiency. The higher the ride, the harder the fall. The bill comes due.

The CEO-centric view of the universe

One of my least favorite things about YC is the way it seems to pursue extremely young and inexperienced founders. If you’ve never been a manager, director, VP, staff or principal engineer, it’s a lot easier to look down on those people and disrespect the role they play in the ecosystem.

It looks like Brian Chesky was about 26 years old when he cofounded Airbnb. He has basically been a CEO for his entire career. And this is, I think, a great example of the kind of blinkered perspective you get from someone who has no real idea what it’s like to sit anywhere else on the org chart.

After watching the first 40 minutes of this talk, one might reasonably wonder if Brian Chesky understands that being CEO of a company means being accountable for its outcomes.

What makes all of this extra frustrating is that in the final five minutes, he shows us that he does know this…at least when it comes to board interactions.

“Oftentimes if you take advice from a VC and it doesn’t work and you don’t have traction…You’re still held responsible. So the only thing that matters is you’re successful, not if you listen to them or not. People sometimes forget and they’re like, well, you shouldn’t have listened to me. They don’t say it that way, but that’s kind of the way it happens. So I would just know that, like, you own the outcome no matter what.”

Yeah, bro. You do.

 

“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking