“ each bright new day’s absolutes — chosen or damned — were built into the routine” Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
There’s a fascinating new hiring anti-pattern I’ve been observing in the tech world.
Everyone is probably familiar with Christensen’s famous criticism of hiring “the right stuff” to manage a startup. And anyone who has ever directed a successful new product will get chills of horror when reading his description of a failing startup: “Its features got specified and locked in before a single paying customer had used the product”.
Briefly, the mistake is hiring someone who has run a successful division within a larger company, or of hiring someone who has run a successful venture. These folks have not learned the lessons they will need when starting something disruptive from scratch. Disruptive startups need to develop the customer before they build the company, and that means experimentation. The leader you are looking for is one who has gone through a very particular school of hard knocks: failing at starting a business, or launching something, realizing it doesn’t work, and then iterating towards a working strategy. “Failure and bouncing back from failure can be critical courses in the school of experience.”
Recently I’ve observed a related anti-pattern that hasn’t yet been called out: hiring leaders with a spectacular track record of success at a successful start-up.
Hiring early employees from what I call “name brand” startups such as Google, Facebook, and Snap certainly looks on the surface like a good move. They have start-up experience after all, so they aren’t like the leaders in Christensen’s example are they? It turns out they are: they lack the key lessons in experimentation.
I’ve observed this first-hand when a certain startup (who shall remain nameless) hired a Vice President of Engineering who was early at Facebook and had risen up the ranks. In the new company he was a spectacular failure, driving out half the engineering team within the first year and not releasing anything new. He simply did not understand how to put together and motivate a team to do the proper experimentation during customer development. Having never failed at anything, he just doubled down the pressure when things didn’t work. And of course, that made them not work even worse.
Having started a team and developed the product from scratch a couple of times, as well as having been a fire-starter within the research and new product groups in big companies, I certainly know what it means to fail. In some cases I’ve had the room to pivot, in others I had to take the lesson learned and use it to get better on the next try.
And I hope those knocks gave me a little bit of what truly is the right stuff.