Pinterest: Hire the Quirkiest People You Know
Ben Silberman didn't use frameworks. He hired people he wanted to work with. High integrity. Low ego. Hard workers.
His best early hires were the weirdest people he'd ever met. Engineers who built elaborate board games. Coders who did magic tricks. That quirkiness became Pinterest's DNA.
Creative, quirky people who obsess over many things and master one tend to build great products.
Stripe: Think Like a Value Investor
John Collison says your first 10 hires are brutal. Nobody wants to join your unknown company. Friends tell candidates not to take the job.
Stripe's solution: find undervalued talent. Their first designer was 18, in high school, in Sweden. Their CTO was in college. Known stars won't join you. Find the undiscovered ones.
If someone is a known spectacular quantity, they're already happy somewhere else. Find the hidden gems.
The Three Traits That Matter
John Collison studied Stripe's first 10 hires and found three things in common. They were genuine and straight. People trusted them and wanted to work with them.
They finished things. Not just started them. And they cared about tiny details to the point of seeming crazy. Every API error went to everyone's inbox. Every outgoing email got proofread by the whole team.
It was offensive to them when something was just a little bit off. That's the kind of caring you need.
No Wrong Place to Find Them
Craigslist ads. Random tech talks. Bar meetups. Weekly barbecues at the office. Silberman found hires everywhere.
The key insight: great people are already doing something else. You have to seek them out. They will never come to you. Especially when nobody has heard of your product.
Good people are always busy doing something else. You have to go find them.
Why Bad Conditions Are a Feature
Pinterest had a terrible office. Nobody got paid. There was zero external reason to join.
That was the point. Everyone who joined did it for the purest reason: they wanted to build something great. When conditions are bad, you know the people who show up actually believe in the mission.
When the office is terrible and the pay is zero, the people who join are the ones you actually want.