Hiring and team building

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Why Hiring Is the Startup’s Hardest Problem

Tonight is going to be a little different, because you are actually going to have to participate. For once I get to relax and watch how you engage yourselves. The reason is simple: hiring is not a sport you can engage in from the sidelines. You have to jump right in and be part of the action.

We are going to build on last week’s discussion of vision, mission, and culture. Culture is the basis for hiring, because it establishes who you are, how you behave, and what kind of people you want to build around you into a team that can continue that culture and be additive to it rather than dilutive to it. (For those who missed last week, the material on culture, vision, and mission is up at startupsecrets.com or mjskok.com.) Tonight’s focus is the practical elements of hiring.

The reason we split this workshop out on its own is that the number one thing I hear from startups is that they are challenged with hiring the right people, and making sure those hires stick. Both points are absolutely critical. You might feel like you hired the right person, but if they do not stick around to be part of your business and ultimately its success, then it was not the right fit. And that can be very costly.

To bring this to life, I have two great guests who spend their lives doing this. Russ is a 25-year veteran of the HR profession. He runs HR at iRobot today, but his role has been eminent in our local community all the way back from Lotus, when Lotus was one of the giants in our industry, through Phase Forward, one of the companies we were lucky enough to fund, which he took public, and now iRobot, with a number of companies in between.

I also wanted you to hear from somebody in the thick of hiring right now: Eric Gaffen from Acquia, the fastest growing startup in this region and noticed as the fastest growing software startup in the country. To give you a sense of the scale, Eric has had to go through 16,000 interviews to make 180 hires in the last year. That is not an easy task, and he can share how you manage a process like that and what it takes to hire the right people.

I want to be clear on my style: I do not believe I have the answers here. I have a basis for discussion, a framework for you to get engaged on the topic. Tonight’s agenda: some background, some tools, and then a workshop where you actually do a little interviewing yourselves.

Startup Secret: The most important capital is human capital. It is not the money you raise; it is the talent you find that lets you build a company you have conviction around.

Most startups tell me they cannot find the quality of talent. I do not think that is the real problem. There is plenty of quality talent around Boston. The real challenge is finding the fit.

Startup Secret: You are what you hire. You can try to be fifty things based on a product, but if you do not have the people to take that product to market, engage your audience, and build the relationships with your customers to service and support them, you have nothing. Every hire you make, whether you like it or not, becomes a Lego block in the model that builds your business.

A’s Hire A’s

Here is an oldie but goldie. The first thing you should realize is that A players hire A players. A players know how to hire A-quality candidates. But the bad news is that if you hire B’s, they hire C’s. B players always hire underneath themselves, because the very fact that they are a B player makes them say, “I do not want to be challenged by somebody.” So they hire people who will not challenge them, and they hire C’s. And C’s cost you your company.

It is a very slippery slope. Many times you will find yourself saying, “But I have to fill this post. We are desperately understaffed in services or support, there are not enough people to pick up the phones.” If you slip and say, “I am just going to get a body in the seat, I will hire that B because it fills the gap for now,” trust me, that is a mistake.

Establishing a culture and a hiring practice that gets you over that slope gives you the confidence to look beyond what can feel like an impossible void of experience, knowledge, and skills, and instead look for things like aptitude and attitude, which can be just as important in finding the right hire.

A’s does not mean A students. It does not mean getting the best grad out of MIT or the Sloan school (I should have said Harvard). Wherever you come from, there is a bias around certain talents and skills, and we are going to try to quash that tonight.

The Cost of the Wrong Hire

This is not just me talking. When you lose great people, you lose everything they know, and that is not just their literal knowledge. It is who they know, their networks, their connections with customers, the relationships they have internally. You lose a piece of the fabric of your company. If you are a five-person startup and you lose one person, that is 20% of your entire value as a company gone.

Even when you get big, this matters. A stat from the MIT Sloan Review on very large companies: even for just 1% of employees being lost, it is a $25 billion assessed cost. People can measure this, but you know it intuitively. It is really painful when you make the wrong hires, and it can be fatal if it is something like hiring the wrong founder. Many of you here are still building your founding teams, so it is essential you take time to understand this. It is about developing both the art and the science of hiring. The workshop is the art. Now for some of the science.

Three Questions Every Hire Must Answer

Hiring can feel like you just sit down, have an interview, and get to know somebody. But it is all in the details. If I was forced to say, in my experience over 30 years, what I really want to make sure happens in a hire, it comes down to three things:

1. Can they be successful at the job? Are you setting up their skill set to be a successful fit in your particular role? If you do not set them up to be successful, you cannot blame them. You have to look at yourself and ask, “Why did I mismatch? What did I learn? What did I think I needed but did not find?”

2. Will they really love this job? This is more fundamental and it is a softer challenge. Do they want to come to work every day fired up about it? The energy has to come from within them, because no matter how much you incent them or how much opportunity you offer, if it is not something they can internally relate to, it is not sustainable. Startups are hard work and go through tough times. When they do, the determinant of whether someone is really successful is whether they still believe in it, for their own reasons.

3. Will they fit and reinforce your culture? Culture is a funny thing; you may not be able to measure it, but it has a massive impact. There is a reason the companies that are best to work for consistently outperform all others. Over a decade, they outperform their comparables by 300%. We want people who reinforce that impact and our culture.

EKS, IQ, and CQ

EKS is Experience, Knowledge, and Skills. Why split those three out? What is different about experience versus skills?

You can learn things and be intellectually aware but not know how to execute on them. Some people compartmentalize knowledge rather than integrate it. Skills can be a method that leads into experience, but they are not the same thing. I might not have experience in a specific type of coding, but if I have the skills to program, that is valuable.

Use the coding example. You might have absolutely the best C programming skills, but no experience building a back-end system for a huge scalable website using those skills. You have the skills, but you applied them in a completely different way, maybe in a mobile app rather than a webscale app. The classic mistake is confusing the two: “This guy was a brilliant programmer,” without thinking about whether that programming experience lines up with the task you are going to set them.

Skills are interesting. People put a long laundry list at the bottom of their resume: C, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, on and on. Does that mean they are a good programmer? Not necessarily. They might have the languages under their belt, but if they do not know how to apply them, if they compartmentalize and do not have that malleable intellect to apply skills to the problem at hand, that synthesis, then those skills are dead to you. You could access those skills through the internet or a book. You want someone who can mold their skills around the situation and problem at hand.

Now the knowledge piece. Suppose the problem is a healthcare IT problem, very deep in the domain of healthcare. Now imagine someone has the experience building a web back end and the right skills because they are a good programmer, but they are tackling a completely different domain than they have ever done before, nothing to do with healthcare. That is different. Domain expertise (knowledge) may be very important, because healthcare carries a whole set of regulations.

Russ on Phase Forward and domain expertise: Phase Forward was one of the first companies to take the FDA drug approval process, the clinical trial process, and move it from paper to a cloud-based process. You were enrolling thousands of patients; doctors used to track on paper, then forward it to the drug company, which correlated the data and analyzed it for efficacy. We changed that paradigm. When we recruited software developers, we could find the skills and the experience with those skills, but we did not have the domain expertise. There were FDA requirements that had to be coded into the software, and privacy requirements governing how data can be moved, not just within the application but across geographic borders. So we had to look for people with that level of knowledge, either from a similar application base or from having worked in a healthcare setting with the kind of FDA requirements we needed to code.

Phase Forward was a very successful company; it went public. But it was not easy to find someone skilled as a programmer, with the experience of that kind of webscale, and the domain knowledge to deal with those regs. That is the bad news: you very rarely get the perfect candidate who has all three of experience, knowledge, and skills. Tonight is partly about what you do in those circumstances.

IQ, where applicable. It goes almost without saying you want smart people; nobody wants to hire dumb people. The problem is what “smart” means. The most daunting temptation is to challenge people purely on intellect, but intellect is very rarely the driver of success. In fact, I have had to fire some of the smartest people I hired, precisely because they believed they were the smartest people in the room and had no interest in teaming with anyone who might challenge them. That makes them very difficult to work with.

Will They Really Love the Job?

This one should be easy, yet people do not spend enough time on it. If you go home with nothing else tonight, understand how to interview for this question, because in my experience it can be more important than any other piece of the equation.

Can you find out what people are really passionate about? Nobody taught me entrepreneurship. I learned it because I was determined, from an embarrassingly teenage age, to figure out what made it possible to build companies. Here I am with zero qualifications, and I figured my way through it.

A student asked whether my love of entrepreneurship preceded my knowledge of coding. My story is not that interesting. The web did not exist. There was no such thing as a PC. When I learned coding, I was programming the world’s first programmable calculator, the HP-65, because it was the only thing I could get my hands on. But my passion for solving problems translated into: what could I do if I could automate that on programmable calculators, or what became PCs later? Nobody told me I could not do something, and I was passionate enough to keep at it until I figured it out.

Startup Secret: Passion and persistence very often overcome almost every other attribute, if the person can be set up to apply whatever limited experience, knowledge, or skills they have to a problem.

When you interview, you are trying to find a fit for what they love to do, because it is like putting fuel in the gas tank. If they bring energy, passion, persistence, real desire, and a strong conviction that they can make a difference, all you need to do is put the fuel in the right gas tank and set them on the right road. They will make it.

I worry that many hires are made the exact opposite way. You hire the brightest guy, but they are not interested in the problem you are solving or the domain you work in, and at some point they peter out because they cannot relate to it or engage with it.

This is sometimes the first and only question I ask in an interview. I will not let people out of an interview until I have understood what makes them tick, what they are passionate about. Here is how the question might start: “I have met you for the first time. Tell me what gets you out of bed in the morning. What do you love doing? What are you excited about? What does your perfect day look like?” These should be easy questions, an invitation to speak forever.

Here is what I find: very few people actually stop and ask themselves that. We get thrown into whatever field we are in, or worse, we take a job because we need to pay the mortgage or pay off school debt. The job we wanted was not available, and next thing we know we are paying the bills by our job as opposed to really living life by it.

When it really works, you do not even ask that question. You are having so much fun at work that it is life. Your life and your work are one and the same. I can walk around companies and palpably see people coming to work excited, building their communities there, loving working together, showing up every day excited about the next great thing they can do together. By contrast, on some site visits, the stats might be up and to the right on the charts, but I walk around and think, “I am not going to back this group,” because there is a bunch of employees doing a job. At some point, somebody with a passionate team, all the gas in their tank, is going to run right past them.

Startup Secret: People who love what they do take pride in their work, they do it well, and the results and rewards follow. The reverse is not true. I have never hired somebody who told me they want to get rich, because I do not believe that is how it works. When you really love what you do, you cannot help but do it well; you feel you can make a difference; and if you are plugged into a situation where what you do aligns with what the company needs, you will make a difference. That is what good cultures do: they set you up for success, connecting your passion with the mission and vision so you contribute in every way. Then you get noticed, you get rewarded, you feel great, and you do more of it. The virtuous circle keeps being fed and everyone wins.

There is no accident in Acquia’s success. There is a specific guy, Dries Buytaert, who started what is now the largest open source project on the planet, Drupal, with over a million people following him, because he is passionate about connecting and enabling people to communicate.

Eric on Dries and passion: Hearing Michael talk about passion, I got a chance to interview with Dries, the founder of Drupal, a guy who believes so passionately in what he does and that the open-source methodology is the way the world is going to change. It is pure passion. We want people who come into the organization and say, “I love what you are doing, I want to be part of that, I understand where you are going and I want to experience that day to day.” One of our best examples is our VP of engineering: his question is not about school projects or experience or your job. It is, “When all is said and done for your day and it is nine or ten o’clock at night and you sit down in front of your computer, what are you going to do?” He wants to hear people say, “I am messing around with Python. I am learning PHP. I work on this really cool project on the side.” We want people whose passion is going to elevate them to levels they were not at before.

Startup Secret (the hard claim): If you cannot find what people are passionate about and connect it to what you are trying to do as a business, you will not make great hires. The minute the alignment is off one degree, it becomes a mile very quickly in a startup, because you grow so fast.

I did a short interview earlier today with a gentleman who had a real interest to do a startup. When we talked about the potential of the role coming up, the first question I asked was, “Will this be a deflection? Will this take you off your path?” Because if it takes him off his path, I would rather determine that up front, since that path is what he will ultimately pursue.

Startup Secret: Never try to sell somebody onto your path. That is not sustainable. What works is helping them uncover that what you are doing is actually aligned with their passion. When you find people doing what they are passionate about, you get statements like Thomas Edison’s: “I never did a day’s work in my life.” That should be you.

The corollary, for when you are being hired: do not get sold. Be authentic about your answers, explicit about what you really want to do. If you do not know, that is okay; tell them why you do not know. Let your interviewer understand what you are trying to work through. If you love problem solving but are not sure you want a technical role, explore other examples of problem solving, maybe in customer service. If you love conversation and engaging customers but are not good at selling, maybe there is an opportunity in PR. Your vocational talents can be applied in many ways. The most important thing is that you authentically expose them and the interviewer listens for them and matches them to the job at hand. That is the great skill in interviewing.

Chris, the VP of engineering at Acquia, asks the late-night question. One of mine is: “If this was your last day at work, what would you want to do? It is all over after today. You had 24 hours to do the craziest thing you wanted, but it is today. What is it?” That probably is at the heart of what you are excited about. Every day should feel like your last day, because you do not know whether it is. You might as well find the thing you are so excited to do that if today was the last day, you would go out feeling proud.

Situational Hiring: The Swiss Army Knife vs. the Specialist

Let us get beyond EKS and IQ into what sets someone up for success, which depends on your situation. Three people is very different from 300 people. With three people trying to do everything a startup does, you have generalist roles. You need people who are good Swiss Army knives. As one of my founders put it, they have to be a cross between everything in the kitchen sink and the Swiss Army knife, the “Swiss Army kitchen,” which was a joke to say startups have incredibly broad needs and people do multiple jobs. At 300, people have much more specialist needs; you specialize in specific disciplines.

So figure out whether you have people who understand how to be flexible and adaptable for an early stage. That might be a question you add if you are only three people. At 300, you might ask something like, “In this role, we need somebody with great judgment dealing with major-account problems,” and that judgment is actually more important than intellect.

Startup Secret: Hiring is situational to your particular company, not just to the task of “hiring a programmer” or “hiring a salesperson.” What do you sell? How do you sell it? What are your expectations for how it is done? Maybe you need somebody who will go above and beyond, a customer support agent who will figure out problems you have never solved because you are too early to have built the knowledge base. Those are the situational things to think about. The single most important word tonight is fit: does what you see in this person really fit the need you have in this particular part of the organization?

EQ: Why Emotional Quotient Is Decisive in Startups

Of EKS, IQ, EQ, and CQ, this is the one most determinant of whether you get a successful connection into your organization: EQ, emotional quotient.

Why is EQ especially important in a startup? Expanding a startup means connecting with people, and a huge part of connecting is how much you understand and relate to them. It is hard to team with anybody if you cannot get along with them.

Speed teaming. In a startup, great teams are constantly forming and reforming around specific issues that keep changing. People quickly group cross-functionally, independent of rank, dig into a problem, solve it, and disperse.

Eric on Acquia’s DNA, “jump in and own it”: Jump in and own it is a core component of our DNA, and we keep our DNA elements as simple as possible. It means you see a problem, go fix it, come up with a solution, jump in, join a team. I have been with the company eight or nine months and have been part of about 20 different teams; we solve problems, disperse, and move on to other things, cross-functionally, with finance, engineering, product, and HR. It is exciting and empowering. If you tell your people that when they see a problem they jump in, and you reward them for it and do not punish them for failure, you will be successful. At Acquia, if you are going to fail, do it quickly, learn, and do it right the second time.

A real speed-teaming example, Acquia U: Despite a million people in the Drupal community worldwide contributing code, there is a lack of talent we are trying to find in Boston, Portland, Oregon, or Brisbane, Australia. So we are trying to create talent out of almost nothing. Coming off an off-site meeting, in the last month we put together Acquia U, a cross-functional team of HR, product, customer solutions, and engineering, to build core curriculum to teach people who are not in Drupal now to become Drupalists, converting LAMP-stack developers into people we can use. It came up very quickly, we are moving on it, building curriculum and hiring plans, incredibly fast. If it does not work, it will not be the only time we do it.

Now imagine you had made a bunch of hires with low EQ, low self-awareness, who did not know how to connect or communicate and were difficult to get along with. That team would go poorly, and Acquia U would be very hard to make happen. EQ is critical in startups precisely because of the need to move flexibly and quickly, which is your great advantage as a startup.

Second reason: the version-three problem. As a startup, you very rarely have the right product until version three. What do you need between version one and version three? Feedback, from inside the market and from customers, about your product. If you are difficult to get along with, that is not going to be easy. You need emotional intelligence to connect with customers. It is critical to build a relationship with a customer even when you do not have a solution for them. Most of the time you are inflicting pain on them while you figure out how to get something useful. You have to keep that relationship through the up, down, and sideways movement to figure out the real problem you are solving, through versions one, two, and three, which can take a long time. This customer intimacy is a perfect example of why you must have EQ in your startup hires.

Third reason: every stakeholder. Every stakeholder is a critical piece of a startup. Your first investors, angels, friends and family, seed investors, are super personal. Even VCs: you need these people to work with you as expectations go unmet, because they never all get met. What about your suppliers? If you treat suppliers badly and have no relationship, then production takes off, you cannot fulfill, you call them for a favor, and you have no EQ connection, that is tough. Everything you do to build your company depends on having EQ in your team. It is not optional.

Now, how important EQ is can vary by culture. Some companies are clear-cut, ruthless, and very successfully deliver on everything they promise, and that works for certain people; they do not need high-EQ, touchy-feely relationships (this is why we talked about culture first). By contrast, a very well-organized, team-oriented group determined to have great customer intimacy should not hire ruthless, purely results-driven people.

Russ on EQ, Lencioni, and Nervewire: This is a critical dimension that often gets diminished or ignored. For a more theoretical framing, read Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage (he also wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team). Get the ebook; read the first chapter and discard the rest. He talks about the difference between a smart organization and a healthy organization. The healthy organization is what he defines, in different words, as EQ; the smart organization has great intellect, IQ, EKS. The ones that have both succeed; the ones with only smarts fail. It is that clear.

I worked in a services-based startup called Nervewire in the early 2000s. They were so serious about this that, because of speed teaming, their interviews were organized around it. They asked you about situations where you participated in a successful organization, and they listened for the pronouns you used. “I” was not as important as “we.” It was a great determinant of how you organize yourself around EQ as it relates to the team. And every person you hire in a startup, from employee number two, three, four, and five, is an extension of you and what you are trying to accomplish, another asset you bring to the equation. If you hire someone who is not aligned or does not contribute to the EQ quotient, you are actually detracting value from the organization.

Q: What weighting should EQ have compared to the other two factors, EKS and IQ?

Eric: You can interview a lot of folks and find the same EKS and IQ, and I would only hire the people with EQ. For me it is the determinant of whether they get hired or not.

Russ: Michael said A’s hire A’s. In my book, if you do not have the EQ, if you cannot participate in a team, and I love the example that an inch becomes a mile because of the trajectory of your growth, if you do not have that at the core, and your organization requires customers or requires you to build a product as part of a team, then, going to Lencioni’s book, you cannot be successful. Rather than a weighting, it is cultural; for most companies it is a bar you have to get over.

Michael: Never mind a weighting. If you do not have it, you are not going to get in the club. But that is cultural.

Summary: EQ and CQ Fit

EKS and IQ, of course you have to assess. But what is really important is your EQ and CQ fit. Can you figure out whether this person will be effective within your team and organization? And, without repeating all of last week, do they fit your culture? Do they believe the same things, share the same ethics, values, and principles, align with the way you run your company? Do they believe that how you do business, not just what you do, is important? If they do, you are on the right basis to assess everything else. For most startups, this is a bar, because you are so dependent on your core team in the early stages.

We are lucky at Harvard to have great material on this. I highly recommend Noam Wasserman’s book on the founder’s dilemmas, which shows how critical this is in the early stages of founding. And a highly relevant quote, since Twitter went public today, from their CEO: the fit between personalities was so much more important than just finding people who are good. That is what propelled Twitter to a multi-billion-dollar valuation; they have a CEO who knows how to build around that. Twitter did not start with a multi-billion-dollar market cap; it started with 143 characters. It is what you do with the acquisition of talent that lets you build big companies. It is easy to say and hard to do.

Practical Interview Questions

For IQ, my favorite question connects to the actual job: “What is the most relevant experience, knowledge, and skills you bring to this job?” It forces them to figure out what the job is. If they have not been listening to what the job is, they are stumped. If they have a high IQ and understand the job, they will quickly pick out what in their past is relevant. How well they answer shows how well they understood and can connect.

People sometimes have a hard time without examples. Ask for their favorite example of a problem they solved and how they solved it. The real question is: what do they consider a problem? One person says, “I had a bug and had to solve it.” Another says, “The problem was that our team was dysfunctional and I had to figure out how to get them back together to get our product back on track.” Which one do you hire? Not the one focused on the bug; the one focused on the team.

Another fun one: “What are you most proud of in your work interactions?” I once had a very successful engineer answer that he formed a football team outside work that was incredibly successful, and then he brought the whole analogy back: “The way I built that football team was such and such, and this is how I do my programming, and this is how I brought it into our teams, and this is how we are successful.” The guy is off the charts, a great engineer, but not as a team lead. He is an individual contributor, because he does not like managing but likes being part of the team. What makes him special is that he makes everybody around him successful without being a manager. That is a guy I will hire over and over. And he is not the best programmer; his code is perfectly good, nothing wrong with it, but his products always ship on time, the quality is always high, and his interactions cause everybody else to do great work so the end result is terrific. He did not have the IQ to beat everyone on the team, but he had the EQ to make his team successful.

By contrast, a guy who joined at the same time had a real cultural misfit: he believed he was the smartest in the room and became a problem as we moved from V1 to V2 to V3. Eventually the team ejected him, because he did not believe in something we valued highly: not that the customer is always right, but that the market is always right. It does not matter what we think is the best way to solve the problem unless the market can absorb it. He kept saying, “There is a better way to do it,” but who cares if people cannot actually take that application and use it? The best solution sometimes does not work because it is too hard to adopt or integrate.

QC: Quality Control on the Hire

After all the analysis of IQ, EQ, and CQ, add one more acronym: QC, quality control. Always ask one basic question, and we always did this as a group after group interviews: “Do we all feel like this is net additive to the team?” If it is dilutive to the culture, forget it. If it is dividing people rather than multiplying their skills, it is not going to work.

Some people do not believe in group interviews. But I had dinner last night with Tim Bertrand, who runs sales for Acquia. He told me the three key people running sales now, the head of sales ops, the head of channels, and Tim himself, do not even bother going to the second interview if any one of the three has a sneaking suspicion something is amiss. They just drop it. Why? Because the times they said, “Ah, we will get around that, Mike, you are just particular about that kind of thing,” none of those hires worked out.

Startup Secret: Trust your gut. If you have an instinct that something is off, there is probably a reason. If you really do not feel it is a fit, it probably is not, and you are better off figuring it out up front.

Remember: these are frameworks, not exact answers. I am not saying these are the questions. They are experiences that can inform how you think about what to put forward.

A+ Players: The Three A’s

Everybody wants to hire A players, and since Google introduced “plus,” everybody wants A+ players now. Since we are very unlikely to get every attribute of a perfect EKS and IQ, let us talk about what makes A+ players in practice.

My first three A’s are aptitude, ability, and attitude (ability in the broadest sense of suitability for the job).

Attitude. Why is attitude important in a startup? Startup Secret: Always hire for will and train for skill. You cannot give will to people. Does anybody have an example of where great attitude made an impact?

The Zipcar story (from an audience member): I am the fleet manager for Zipcar Boston. We have a tough task: merging our two fleets between Avis and Zipcar. The toughest part is fleet sharing, getting 85 Avis cars into Zipcar’s fleet for the weekend to balance utilization, a really quick turnaround, in and out the same day, with gas cards and easy passes, not fun especially if it is cold. We were using Avis’s labor and they were not getting along well, so we hired our own employee to make the problem go away. I had been doing it all summer; it is the number one priority. The person we hired was one of the Avis shuttlers; she speaks the Avis language, understands the complicated admin side at Zipcar, came in with a positive attitude, and crushed everything. Young, tech-savvy, understood the Avis system, pretty much the perfect fit. How did I find her? I asked Avis, “Who is your best that you could afford to lose?” They gave me a list, I interviewed them, and she jumped out right away, for attitude: she seemed really eager, and she understood the technical skills. It was fairly risky because she had only been with Avis two months, so I really had to push her through our HR process. It went all the way up to our COO, because HR does not like to promote people cross-company who were just hired within two months, but I was confident she was the person who could do this, speak both languages, and make the problems go away.

That is a great story, as much for your willingness to push it up the chain and take it on. Attitude is one of those things you feel in your gut. It does not show up in EKS or IQ; it shows up another way.

Russ’s story, hire for will not skill: We acquired a company of some of the most brilliant robot-navigation vision scientists on the planet. We found them on a piece of research one of them published that changed the paradigm for machine vision. When you do the due diligence on an acquisition, you look at the profile, the spend line, and say, “We can probably do without these jobs.” We told the CEO founder, an Idealab company, what we thought the integration would look like, and he said, “You cannot touch her.” She was playing an office manager role, something we thought we could manage without. He said, “You take that job out, you lose the entire company. We hired this person out of a rehab program to come back to work. We hired her because of her attitude, because she convinced us in the interview there was nothing she could not accomplish, nothing she would not do. We were a bunch of PhD scientists who could not get out of our own way, making plodding progress, arguing with each other. She showed up, ran the test rigs overnight and told us the results the next morning, had pizza and food for us at the end of the day. She enabled the rest of the team to be successful.” She had nothing in terms of qualifications, but she had a jump-in-and-do-it attitude. Hire for will, not skill.

This attribute is immensely valuable, hard to measure, and can be the difference between something working okay and something working wildly well. It is top of my list of the three A’s.

Aptitude is your ability to learn something quickly. Why is it important in a startup? If you are going to do something innovative, you will move into an unknown area, a breakthrough never done before. You cannot teach people it in advance because it has never been done. So when you get to the other side of somewhere you have never been, with no rules, whether it is machine vision or a new way of interacting with customers for payments, you need the ability to quickly switch into a new gear, learn a new subject, find a new way of working, figure out the new boundaries, and make an impact. That is aptitude, and for startups it is critical.

Ability, in the true sense of suitability, is that fit where all the components come together so this person has the package of experience, knowledge, and skills to do the job. But without the other two A’s, ability alone will not do anything. Many times in a startup, because things speed-team or you hit a new problem, somebody with the wrong attitude who does not want to learn, even with all the abilities in the world, will drag you down. By contrast, someone who came out of rehab and does not know any better than to fight their way through, with a can-do attitude and a real desire to learn, is most likely to plant that flag on top of the hill and get everybody else to follow. The great startups show that DNA over and over, and that is why they succeed.

Quick examples of attitude: problem solving, fail fast and learn faster, digging in and not being afraid of failure. Marginal improvements do not make great startups; big breakthroughs do, and that takes boldness and an attitude that says, “I am okay to fail and willing to learn faster.”

Persistence. The ultimate test of a startup is how well people do when they really screw up. Then you have to have the persistence to say, “I still believe in this, I have the passion, conviction, and belief, and the persistence to go to the next step and figure it all out again if necessary.” That can mean throwing away your assumptions and getting to the root of the problem.

I have a post coming on the eight levels of problem solving. It is about finding people whose attitude says, “I am not just going to fix the bug; I am going to fix the cause of the continuous bugs,” which is that we are not working as a team to build effectively. That is the root cause. The really great companies go one step beyond: “Why did we not build the right team in the first place?” Probably a hiring problem. “We are probably hiring the wrong people, without the right EQ.” Then: “Do we have the culture right, the incentives right? Is management looking at this the right way?” People with the right attitude consistently go all the way to the root cause, persist to figure out what they can do to make a difference, and participate in a way that makes everybody successful, not thinking about their individual merit, knowing they will rise as one of the boats on the tide.

The Three Pluses

Beyond the three A’s, here are three pluses I have learned to look for.

Self-aware. If I can find this early, I can almost guarantee I can build around it. What happens if somebody is not self-aware? They are hard to work with. As an audience member (a former kindergarten teacher who worked in behavioral health) put it: most people follow the proverbial rule, treat people how you want to be treated, but emotionally intelligent people flex to where people are and treat them how they want to be treated. To have awareness of others, you have to have awareness within. If you do not have awareness from within, it is difficult to have awareness around you.

In a startup, self-awareness matters because you build a team around people’s strengths, and you cannot do that if you do not know their strengths. Nobody has only strengths. I will tell you all my weaknesses; there is a long list. But because I know them, I know who to hire. The first person I always hire is the CFO or someone to run ops, because that is absolutely my weakness; I have been told by enough people how bad I am at it. Once you know that, hire the best person to counteract it, ideally someone self-aware enough to say, “That is my strength, but I am not the visionary; Michael, you seem to like that, go for it.” Then you have a team, because you are self-aware about your strengths and weaknesses and know how to work together.

Sometimes people are not self-aware because they are not comfortable admitting their weaknesses, and that can be cultural. So build a safe culture where it is okay to say, “I am bad at X and I need help with Y, and if you could see me through Z, that would be great.” That is a basis for dialogue. If you have to keep banging on the door to find out what somebody is good at and where they are struggling, and they will not admit it, it will be very hard to work with them.

Authentic. A lot of people feel they have to be like this or that. Why? You are who you are. Accept it, get comfortable with it, figure out where it fits and works. Lots of things can build on that.

The athlete. When you do not have a talent pool that fills the position for the particular experience, skills, and knowledge, go to the athlete.

Russ on the athlete: The Zipcar story is a great example: someone with the right set of capabilities, the right attitude, who could operate as an athlete. Another way to think about an athlete is someone who has proven they have been successful at everything else they have done. They may not be the direct customer support person, but they have moved up the sales channels, done another set of work in another part of the organization successfully, and shown a combination of attitude and ability. They are going to be good at whatever they do; they can move one degree left or right and be successful.

So when you cannot find the perfect skill set or they lack the experience, hire the athlete, the person who has shown themselves good at adapting and adopting whatever job came up. Athletes end up adapting to whatever new job you have and being successful at it.

The Golden Triangle

Putting it back together, the golden triangle emerges. If you get people with the right aptitude, ability, and attitude, who have the right experience, knowledge, and skills, IQ and CQ, plus the three pluses, you hit a home run. They can be successful at the job, they really love it, and they fit and reinforce your culture, because you have checked off those things. It does not mean all of these will be there in every hire, but you want tools for uncovering them.

Tools for Uncovering EKS, IQ, and CQ

EKS. Largely not rocket science; it should be on their resume or LinkedIn, or you get it through interviews. But do not get trapped getting them to recite their resume; that is your job, you can read it. Get behind the resume and ask questions that bring forward what actually enabled that experience to produce the person in front of you, and what will set them up for success going forward.

IQ, specific to startups: look for proof. You are almost invariably small enough, certainly early on, to say, “If we are looking for an engineer, let us get them to do some coding, a real-world example.”

Eric on Acquia’s code tests: Different departments do different things. We do code tests and give people creative, odd problems to solve to see the type of code they produce. We are in the open source space, and there is a website called Gild that scrapes websites, figures out what open source coding problems you have solved, and analyzes how you scored in Python, where you could have done better in PHP, and so on. We take that as a benchmark, then give a code test with a realistic problem. Because Drupal is open source, anybody can look at the code, fix a module, do bug fixes, so we say, “Here, fix this problem.” The important point is that it is not just about whether they got it right; I want to know how they came up with their solution, their process, their strategy, why they did it that way. It might not be the most perfect code, but if they had sound fundamental reasons, that goes a long way; it shows the right mindset and the right analytical tools.

Make these tests practical so you are not guessing about whether somebody can actually do the job. Get them engaged in it. You are small enough to do this until you are over a thousand people, and even then you can break it down departmentally.

CQ, the softest piece: the process itself. How do you ensure a good cultural fit? There is the gut check, but pay attention to the process. Everyone knows to show up on time. But how many people thank you for an interview? How many follow up with, “I have some questions for you,” and engage you so you feel, “I would really like to work with this person”? The best hire I ever made: I threw all my questions away and forgot I was having an interview, because this person engaged me so well they took the process over, and I realized this is just somebody I want to work with. Observe the interactions: is it hard to get answers out of them, or does it feel natural, a conversation rather than a torturous interview? I always ask my team afterward: did this feel like an easy process we really enjoyed, where this person naturally flowed along with us? If yes, you are probably observing a cultural fit. Still ask the cultural questions from earlier.

Real References

The tools have to be supplemented by one practical thing you should never skip: get real references. What is the difference between a real reference and the reference they give you? The real reference is not the one that was rehearsed. Anytime someone gives you a reference, I pay no attention to it. The references I care about are the ones I go find that are not on their resume and were not given to me.

Startup Secret: Go find the references of peers, people who worked for them, and people they worked for. All three matter, but pay attention to the details. When someone says, “Yeah, this person was great,” and stops right there, they are usually trying to get you off their back because there is something else. “Would you hire them again?” “Yeah, I’d hire them again.” Listen to the intonation. Was it a flat “Yeah, I’d hire them again,” or “Yeah, I’d hire them absolutely, in a heartbeat, and here is why”?

References are tough because most people do not want to tell you what they think. You have to be a Columbo: play dumb, say, “What did you mean by that? Can you give me an example? What was the experience you had? Can you be specific?” Come up with 20 ways to get behind what someone is saying.

When people approach you for a reference, if you like them you want to say the right thing, but they might not be right for the job. Be specific about why you like them and what they are good at. Startup Secret: Whether giving or getting a reference, tell the truth, because you do not serve anybody well otherwise. If you get someone a job they are not a fit for, you did not do the person or the company a favor. Real references are authentic, very specific, and get to the heart of what this person really is. There is no shortcut; it is plain hard work, and it is worth doing.

Russ on references: Always have the hiring manager do the references. HR or recruiters can assist, but the hiring manager should do them; you get more information. One great question to ask the reference: “What skill are you missing now that this person is gone? What is lacking on your team now?” If they do not have an answer, how valuable was that person to the organization they left?

Acquia: Digital Experience at Scale, and Its DNA

Eric on Acquia: One key component of delivering great digital web experiences is agility. Warner Music Group is the perfect example: we built 250 artist websites on only three templates, but you probably cannot tell they came from three templates; they are customizable and incredibly agile. You see David Bowie up there. When you need to move fast, you need to move fast. David Bowie, no songs for ten years, calls Warner Music Group and says, “I have a new song, it is coming out in four days, be ready.” Warner says, “No problem.” They change their entire website, ready for commerce so they can sell the music and launch.

The two most important days for a musical artist page: the day the song launches, and the day the artist dies. When somebody dies, their web pages get hit again and again. Another example: during Hurricane Sandy, the MTA had over 30,000 concurrent users, 30,000 requests every second, people needing critical information during a massive emergency. Previously, when they had a hurricane or shutdown, their website turned into a text page saying, “Please check back later.” Now they deliver important information, and it became a place people went for housing, food, and shelter, a huge success story for resilience.

Acquia’s DNA: committed to awesome, do the right thing, jump in and own it, give back more, and inspire a little crazy. On “inspire a little crazy”: yesterday Acquia sponsored Lunch Beat, where about 150 people showed up at District Hall in the Innovation District and danced from 12 to 1. Our co-founder Jay Batson was spinning the tunes. Everybody danced, no alcohol, which was the hard part. These are the things we believe make Acquia a fantastic place to work, and the things we look for when hiring.

The other framework is PI-cubed: passion, integrity, intelligence, and initiative. On passion: it is not just about seeing passion in the person you are interviewing; it is about you exuding passion to them, because you need to match their passion and they need to match yours. If you are passionate about your startup and your company, that comes through to the candidate. If you are not, they will see right through it and might not want to join. It is not just about you selecting them; it is about them selecting you. So we always put passion first. (Michael’s three A’s plus Eric’s three I’s, plus passion, spell AI.)

Common Questions About Hiring (Written Up on the Site)

There are questions startups always ask that I have written up so we do not go through them tonight: Should I hire known quantities? Should I hire youth or always hire experience? How do I sell my company but still listen in the interview? These are tough. The material is at startupsecrets.com or mjskok.com.

Russ’s closing wisdom: The parts Michael talks about are the parts that often get ignored. When you are creating something out of nothing, you focus on the content expertise you need and the things that have to get done, but not on the company you are building. Last week was mission, vision, and values; this week is the expression of those through people.

I have seen three industries start, grow, and begin to mature. At iRobot, people think of us as ground zero for the robotics industry. Twenty years ago there was one robotics company in Massachusetts, called iRobot; now there are 127. Our challenge is to find the greatest talent that wants to contribute to our mission: build cool stuff, deliver great products, make money, have fun, and change the world. We talk about each of those attributes in interviews and find out the passion each person has around each. We also focus a lot on giving back; we look at candidates’ interest in contributing back. We give employees two days a year to teach STEM education in schools, do robot demonstrations, or get in front of the Girl Scouts to talk about why girls are needed in engineering. It is part of our dimension of changing the world.

You cannot underestimate the importance of the people you hire from the beginning. I have corporate marketing now, which will shock Michael, corporate communications, PR, web; I own iRobot.com and the creative services team. Part of the reason is that when we started hiring, three years ago, I said I would not let anybody in who could not represent iRobot’s brand in their world, because everybody is a network connection. We sell a consumer product. We architected the interviewing process so that even if people got rejected, they came away with a great experience, because if they had a lousy experience during the interview and later saw iRobot in a store, they were less likely to buy our product. Now, people who come to our website interested in our products, we also try to find out if they are interested in working there.

Startup Secret: Everybody is an extension of the brand you are building. You have a brand yourself, a set of values and passions, and those have to be expressed through everybody you build. The single most important person in the development of the culture is the leader. As a startup, the value you generate includes the relational and equity value, the emotional intelligence of your people, and the relationships they build and have.

To reinforce that: in startups, the brand is you. Leadership from the top creates the culture. Russ is doing exactly that, leading from the front.

Q: When you interview, you say “I” but imply a team is in the room. Is it a group interview, one hire with three or four people, or one-on-one?

Michael: Everybody is different. In the simplest sense, many of my interviews are one-on-one, but people do it differently.

Eric: It depends on the role. Sometimes we do it serially, a series of people interview, but we always coordinate at the beginning and the end. As Michael said about references, when the team sits down together and asks, “Is this really someone additive to our team or dilutive?” You start out as a team and you end as a team.

Russ: Robotics is the integration of many capabilities and technologies, hardware, mechanical, electrical, software, so depending on the role we will have the team interview as part of the process. The manager, like the systems engineering leader, takes the small pile of candidates, windows it down to one or two, and puts them in front of the team. It can be role-dependent or culture-dependent. If your culture is open and team-based, you may want a team-based interview. At Nervewire, the first interview was with the competency lead, the second was always with the team.