The right people at the right place ..
.. make the biggest difference
When successful people [1] are asked what was important for their success, they usually refer to strong values, particular events in their lives that formed them, but more often than not there have been special people along their way that helped to shape their destiny: A particularly important family member, a coach or a mentor who recognized their talent, an investor (or high-level executive) who bet on them (and their ideas) against common sense or a co-founder who was ready to get things started against all odds.
For successful businesses, especially start-ups this means that a couple of early hires make the difference between doom or salvation: An engineer who can find a solution to a hard technical problem makes the product launch possible in the first place. A business developer who strikes an important deal helps the company to survive tough market conditions. An inspiring and engaged VP helps to keep key people while cuts in the workforce are unavoidable.
It’s particularly easy to see why a few people make a key difference in the case of start-ups: If a company has 1.000 employees or more, each employee contributes about 0.1 % on average but if you have 10 people only, each contribution is 10 %. Hence, each person’s contribution is 100x more relevant.
Because this topic is so important, it has been broadly covered by many influential writers but because it is so important, I don’t feel embarrassed to add my couple of bits to it and hope that you will still find it useful for your own considerations.
I would like to cover two things in this text:
1) What to look for in people to work with?
2) Alignment
Let me start with the first topic: What to look for in people to work with?
I deliberately titled this subsection not what to look for “.. in co-founders” but “..in people to work with” as I think, that the points below apply not only to potential co-founders but also if you hire people or you are looking for a place to work at and evaluating your potential colleagues and managers.
First, look for drive. What is drive? Drive is the combination of extraordinary energy levels in a person with the ambition to use this energy to achieve something. People with drive pursue goals. People with drive see opportunity where other people see risk. People with drive try again, again and again, to overcome obstacles.
But most importantly: People with drive get things done. This is exactly what you want, no matter where you work – a start-up, a scale-up or a large corporation. Because only when things get done, things move forward – one step at a time.
And usually people with drive like to work with other people on the team who have drive because they get their things done. Any venture (starting a business, a new institution, building a new technology, starting a band ..) is a complex, long-term project that consists of a multitude of small projects. All these small projects have to get done for the overall thing to work. You want to have somebody with a get-shit-done mentality on each of them. Only then, the efforts compound and the success of each individual compounds into the success of the group; and then the group can achieve something that one single person – no matter how special and talented – could have achieved alone.
You may ask the question “Why is both needed high energy and ambition”? Ambition without energy is a perfect mix for endless complaints and excuses “I am sure hits could be a great idea but it’s just so hard to start.”, while without ambition the energy will be directed at many things at once but not focused on achieving a common goal.
Secondly, look for ingenuity. What is ingenuity? Ingenuity is the combination of intelligence and curiosity. People with ingenuity will surprise with new solutions that you haven’t come up yourself, or even couldn’t come up yourself. Especially, in the latter case, such people create huge value for the company that they work with.
As in the paragraph above: Why are both needed? Intelligent people without curiosity will largely use their smartness to find 20 very well-thought-through reasons why something will not work instead of trying 2 things that have a low chance of success. And curious people without a proper level of “smartness” will find “solutions” that somebody will have to rework again and again. Also, they will lack the intellectual ability to improve and run without further supervision. The consequence is frustration on both sides: They are unhappy because they can’t hold up to the standards that are necessary to build and run a top-notch organization and you are unhappy .. well, because of the same reason.
Don’t confuse expertise with ingenuity. If people know a lot that is great but it doesn’t mean that they can adjust their knowledge (or themselves) to dynamic circumstances. Of course, ideally, you would like to have both – somebody with ingenuity and expertise in the corresponding field. But if you have to choose between both, I would recommend to opt for ingenuity. It might take a bit longer to bring the people on board but it pay off multiple times in the mid and long term because smart people will just pick up the expertise quite fast while in the other case, you might be stuck with what expertise you hired in the first place. In a dynamic market environment that is rather a liability than an asset.
Nevertheless, I would argue that if you can’t find the golden goose, it is a good practice to have a sort of mix: That means at least a couple of people with expertise in key areas that are relevant to the business who can serve as multipliers for their knowledge in the organization, organize best practices and help the others feel that “they have somebody with more seniority to come and ask.”
Thirdly, look for ethics: What is ethics? Maybe that is the easiest thing to describe. It means that a person is trustworthy and loyal.
You can have the smartest, driven, curious person in front of you but if you can’t trust this person, all these positive characteristics go in vain.
Trustworthiness has many dimensions but I will highlight two here that appear especially relevant in this context: On the one hand, you would like to expect the person you work with to have genuinely “good values”. How “good values” are defined is a very broad philosophical field but for the purpose here, I would stick to common sense: That means a person with “good values” will not go behind your back, not pursue goals at your expense, be helpful for its own sake and align her or his actions according to the principle of “caring”.
Yet, another important dimension of trustworthiness is to know that if things are not OK (and things are not OK many times) for the person you work with, to know that it will be proactively addressed. It means that not only “technical” but also emotional transparency is the default. And that is a high standard to seek in people as transparency has consequences. In fact, also the lack of transparency has them. The difference is that the consequences of transparency are experiences usually short-term while the consequences of no transparency pop-up rather mid- to long-term.
If you read the corresponding article about the topic by Marc Anderseen [2], you might recognize that the three points mentioned above align strongly with what he writes. Indeed, I was very surprised to find such an overlap between his ideas and my personal conclusions but maybe it is not that surprising after all as in many fields people come to a similar destination walking different paths.
Still, I would like to add one thing to the list that appears very relevant to me: Look for people with who are able to communicate.
It might seem obvious that if communication between two people doesn’t work, they cannot work together but it seems to be overlooked way too often.
Why it’s so important? Firstly, if communication doesn’t work, then the third point of “trust” more or less automatically breaks down. However, and maybe more importantly, if communication doesn’t work then one critical thing for working successfully together can hardly be achieved: Alignment. We will look into this important issue in the next part of this text.
Alignment
Maybe you have found a person who is driven, ingenious and has great ethics. You can communicate easily for hours. It feels almost like a ro-/sis-/bromance. That’s a great and important start but to put it in mathematical terms: It’s a necessary but insufficient condition.
There is another very important ingredient to having a successful collaboration with somebody: It is alignment.
What is alignment? Alignment means to be “on the same page” and have the same understanding regarding two questions: (1) What is your goal? (2) How to achieve it?
Why is it so important? It’s easiest explained with two graphs as you can find them below:
Suppose that Alice and Bob have started a company and they have to align on two dimensions, for instance, the importance of profitability vs. the importance of growth.
If they fully align in their views and their goals are very close to each other, then indeed they will be able to exhibit the maximum momentum toward their common goal (as shown in the left figure).
On the other hand, if their goals are not aligned (as shown in the right figure), then they will be able to move forward but only with a significantly reduced momentum. The more the goals are misaligned, the lower the momentum is. The far more dangerous part is that very good people who are misaligned will still produce remarkable progress in the beginning. However, the more they progress in their journey, the slower the progress will be due to the misalignment. Eventually, they may come to a point where the collaboration as a whole is no longer possible. If it’s a job-like collaboration, maybe after some painful paperwork, the employee will leave. If it’s a co-founder relationship, the company is at danger of breaking apart completely.
If you jump back to the last subsection and think about the qualities of drive, ingenuity, ethics and communication with respect to alignment, you might realize that it’s not simply “more is always better”.
Let’s take drive as an example: If you want to go at a medium, controlled pace, a person with an unstoppable drive and appetite for more, will probably drive you crazy. A person with an infinite amount of drive and energy rather burns than motivates the people in her proximity if the people do not exhibit a similar level of passion for the project that they work together on. At the same time, the driven person gets heavily frustrated not seeing everybody running at the same pace.
You can imagine that a similar logic applies to ingenuity, ethics and communication.
Thus, it’s not rather about “the same level”. It’s not about finding the people with “infinite” drive but with the right drive for your type of collaboration. It’s not about having the most eloquent person with the best sales pitch but about the people with whom you have a natural way of discussing complex and controversial topics but also concluding them!
Having alignment (or misalignment) in these four areas will affect strongly the alignment regarding the “how” area. Alignment in the “how” area can touch big operational questions such as “Do we expect ourselves and/or our employees to work long hours to reach our goals?”, “Do we prioritize quality over speed?”, “Are we willing to go all-in and take high risks or rather move it safely?”. At the same time the “how” area of alignment relates to many practical (maybe even seemingly simple) questions such as “Do we encourage or discourage remote work?”, “Do we prefer to have the office in location A or location B”, “Do we allow BYOD?”, “Which IDE to use?”, “Do we do dailies at 8 am?” etc.
It may seem obvious that it is important to find common ground on the “big operation questions”. Nevertheless, also the smaller issues matter as they may affect the “daily experience” of every person involved in the company more than can be seen on the surface. And these experiences compound. One small issue might be OK but a combination of smaller issues makes up a big issue eventually.
One important thing to mention about the “how” alignment is that it is orthogonal to the “what” alignment regarding some aspects while it is also inherently intertwined with it in other aspects.
This is easy to spot if we examine the “what” alignment for a moment: It is about questions such as “What is the product that we want to build?”, “What is our vision?”, “What impact do we expect?” but also questions such as “Do we aim to build an SME with 50 employees or a unicorn hyper-scaler if we commit the next 10 years of our life to this venture?”. Answers to these questions naturally reflect themselves on the “how” side of things: If you want to build a very fast-growing company, you will approach things at a different pace than a mid-sized lifestyle company. If you want to build a company that involves hardware development (and/or integration), you will think differently about remote work than if your business idea is a 100% SaaS business.
Therefore, questions on “what” come first but “how” follows shortly after and in most practical settings one cannot think one without the other due to the interdependencies described above. Especially, if some downstream dependencies of “what” decisions imply “how” aspects that are in strong contrast to what you want, it is at least advisable to be aware of the corresponding “out-of-comfort zone sacrifices” that come along with the decisions made.
So if you think of starting something new - a new job or a new project, it’s a good idea to first align with yourself to see if the “what” and “how” aspects of this new thing are in correspondence with your own self image.
If this new thing involves multiple people (and typically it will), you can’t avoid looking for alignment with these people – on both things the “what” and the “how”. This can be a painful exercise indeed because if it is done thoroughly and openly, a probable outcome is that no alignment can be found. Sometimes this outcome is ignored, especially if some initial traction can be seen and there is a lot of “day 1” excitement. Indeed, if a consensus cannot be found, things might still work out for a while – basically while things are running according to plan. However, when the plan doesn’t work out as intended, discrepancy in alignment lead to over-proportional discrepancies in examining “what went wrong” and “what solutions might be”. This makes perfect sense, as “achieving alignment” means to come a similar view of the world around us, a similar subjective interpretation of it. With a similar perspective, we can much more easily find common ground for solutions than with opposing views.
Of course, “perfect alignment” (i.e. alignment in all possible areas) can never be achieved. Especially, once a project starts to grow and more people start to join, the thing cannot adjusted for each new hire. Nevertheless, alignment in key areas is mandatory [4].
And it is important to remember that if you are lucky to find exceptional people and twice as lucky to be well-aligned with them, then don’t take it for granted. Alignment is not a one-time stop. We all are subject to growth and change just as the world around us. Consequently, finding alignment in core areas is an exercise that is to be repeated regularly and hopefully each time successfully. [5]
[1] The definition of the word “successful” would deserve a whole post if not rather a whole book or series of books to look at its different aspects and define it. For purpose of this text, I will think of “successful people” as people who achieved or over-achieved the goals that they set for themselves.
[2] https://pmarchive.com/how_to_hire_the_best_people.html
[3] Our most important alignment task as a species is yet to come: Mastering super alignment with the silicon superintelligence that we are building.
[4] The key areas may very well differ depending on the people involved.
[5] If you ask yourself “how to check for the presence of the corresponding qualities” and “if you are aligned on them”, I think I can only repeat what many people said before me: Start doing things together – a small project, maybe organizing something and you will quickly find out if you tick in the same way in key areas. I can highly recommend the corresponding lessons from the YCombinator start-up school on this issue.