Blitzscaling – Hiring Strategies and Other Thought Processes

FIRE Thoughts!

“Do I want this person and the 50 people who I think they will hire? Because even if they won’t literally hire 50 people, they will be so influential in determining the self selection of those 50 people – you are really picking this giant approval branch of your future organization.”
“Everybody’s building empires, but we’re building roads.”
48:30 – you can’t judge a decision by their outcomes…you have to judge a decision by their expected value (basically weighted probability of your decision…assuming when you are presented with binary or tertiary initiatives to work on, you have to mentally weight the probability of the outcome of each particular decision)
1:06:38 – You should write more as you scale – writing persist through time and can be revisited/updated, and in most cases, add rigidity and clarity to thoughts. Bruno Latour, the French philosopher noted that not only does the invention of writing/printing press allow scientific innovation through the proliferation mechanism but more importantly, it helps add concreteness and rigidity of thoughts. It’s easier to reject and approval good and bad ideas on paper.

Overview & Hiring

25:50 – be willing to wait a long time to hire great people. Do several weeks-long ‘trial’ with them.
27:45 – look for good people and then convince them to expressed interest, as opposed to expressed interest (via application) then convince them
28:36 – some mgmt team member took 3+ years to hire (from initial touch-point to hire) i.e. they started reaching out to current management team members years back
1:05:04 – CEO should make relative less # of decisions as we scale

11:10 – We should spend more time on reading history than business books/case studies “everyone ignores all the good ideas from history, and most good ‘ideas’ are written down in books…”
13:30 – Alan Curtis Kay (the computer scientist, what he is known for is beyond my immediate level of comprehension) there is a progression…things built upon what came before, but in technology/computer science, it’s more ladder-oriented than building progression based on what came before

Published by Jerry