One Person Per Quarter
Collison: The received wisdom is — work really hard to hire the best people. And you're like, gee thanks, I was going to do the opposite. The question is to what length should you go and what does that actually mean in practice.
In practice, it means being okay waiting a really long time to hire people. It took me six months to hire the first two people. A person per quarter — even though we had this network already and knew all these people. In the six months after that, we maybe hired another three or four.
Six months to hire the first two people. One per quarter. Even with a network.
Three-Plus Years
Collison: You think about the smartest people you know and you want to get them to work on your thing. Chances are the smartest people you know are working already. They have pretty good paths ahead of them.
There are multiple people at Stripe today who took us several years to hire. I can think off the top of my head of maybe five people who took three-plus years to hire.
Five people at Stripe today took three-plus years to hire.
The Vicious Cycle and the Compound Interest
Collison: The vicious cycle is that you're going so slowly when it's the first two or three people. You're like — holy smokes, if we could just get another set of hands. But you don't want to do it.
If you get just one great person, that makes it marginally easier to get the next great person. It's compound interest in spades.
One great person makes it marginally easier to get the next. Compound interest in spades.
The Tree of 50 People
Collison: Rather than just thinking — do I want this person or not — think about it as: do I want this person and the 50 people who I think they will hire? Even if they don't literally hire 50 people, they will be so influential in determining the self-selection of those 50 people.
Don't think about one hire. Think about the 50 people they'll influence.