Culture is Key

If a startup scales outside of the proverbial garage, hiring decisions are some of the most important a founding team must make. Paul Graham notes that it is tough to find independently-minded talent in the pipeline, due to its rarity. An equally as tall a task is to keep the same culture in a 50 person team as it was in the beginning with 3 founders and a box of pizza.

This fear is what kept McDonald’s a single store in San Bernardino (before Ray Kroc came along). However, as we learned from Ted Lichtenberger, it is possible to keep a pulse on company culture with expansion. Ted’s advice on this front was simple: hire people who believe in your product and mission. This seems obvious, but it is often lost on founders.

Thinking back to the recruiting processes I went through the past 3 years at UVA, companies seek competence, qualifications, and social fit primarily. After an initial screen for qualifications, the rest can be boiled down into Ted’s simple question of believing in the product. Founders are successful when they are stubbornly perseverant and irrationally obsessed with their product/service. Hiring employees who feel the same way is the most surefire way to maintain company culture.

Especially in the stage between a Seed Round and a Series B, every employee has the potential to shift the company. A founder works tirelessly to get to the point where there is capital to offload work to employees, and it is easy to get lost in signals when making these decisions. Prestigious prior experience and Ivy League degrees might seem like great hires, but if a founder can only ask (non-technical) employees 5–50 a single question, it should be “Why do you love our product as much as I do?”