Evaluating Candidates

"The goal of the competency model is not to find a unicorn human being that is an 11 out of 10 on every one of these things, because frankly, that person doesn't exist... The goal is to create a well-rounded team so that you're hiring and balancing skills across your team and that you don't have any gaps in your portfolio."

"I tend to skew more towards internal hire to be perfectly honest, because I believe in creating opportunity inside a company... I also believe that helping people transition into new roles is a way to get more people into the practice. One of the benefits that you get from that is a lot of time they have one of those competencies really nailed already. Could be like customer knowledge."

"I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI."

"A lot of it actually happens outside of the interview process interestingly. So a lot of it is the types of questions they asked, 'Have they actually tried your product and gone deep into it?' A lot of it is, it's the references, it's the communication that they have to even set up your interview, it's the energy they bring into the conversation."

"Anything let's say C or below, comfortable with chaos and willingness to go do something they have not done for probably 15 years are two huge signals for me, because every company I've been part of at every scale now... that's the thing that a lot of people coming from more traditional marketing environments into startup worlds, it's a pace and just the unpredictability and change."

"Every marketer is going to have a T-shaped career... find out their T, find out their strength, and then spend time figuring out how they make up for those other things."

"And then what he found was after you've gone through that process, if you then use your intuition after having done that, not before, that then you actually can really drastically improve your hit rate on hiring."

"If I'm putting together a product team today, I would really obsess about getting as many skill sets as possible for each person I hire."

"I pretty much always have people join the work simulation for at least a day, often a full week."

"Tell me about a project you're proud of. Tell me about a project you're proud of, is just really open-ended and get to hear a lot about a lot of things that way. And then maybe runner up is tell me about a campaign you recently come across that you were not involved with that you thought was cool."

"I had this belief that sort of these people that I had seen, many of whom have now gone on to start companies that are doing quite well, would be incredible value add... I'd be like, 'If you've been a founder before, even if your startup has failed, please apply to this.'"

"The first thing that I always gravitate towards is just intellectual curiosity. And I know that's very, maybe a little bit overrated, but I think you can tell pretty quickly if somebody's just interested in the world and learning things. And the thing about third party tools is you are constantly learning. You'll never be an expert in everything because there's way too many tools to be an expert on"

"I look less for red flags and more for false identifiers on the resume application that may shortcut me towards the decision. Another one is just school people just look at your school where you went to undergrad or grad and they kind of make a decision one way or the other. And I feel like that's also can be a really bad shortcut."

"I'm going to give you five skills and I want you to stack-rank them for me. One to five. So one being the one you're strongest at and five being the one you're relatively weakest at."

"The devs that really thrive in a growth context are the ones that are motivated by moving quickly, iterating to create measurable impact. They're not attached to their work. They embrace imperfection as part of the process. They happily discard their code, their ideas even. They're curious and they're always looking for ways to be closer to their users."

"At Anthropic, I think we've been maybe much less affected than many of the other companies in the space because people here are so mission oriented and they stay because... They get these offers and then they say, 'Well, of course I'm not going to leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money and my best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity and try to make AI flourish and human flourishing go well.'"

"You don't make people great. You find people that make you great, that make the company great, that you learned from, not the other way around."

"Judge people on what they can do, coach people on what they can do, help them take their strengths and use them as opposed to over focus on their weaknesses... we're investing in strength, not lack of weakness. I want to know how good, are they world-class? Do they have a world-class strength? And can that beat anybody?"

"I'm actually using the book as... If you want to apply for a job with me, we got to go through the process. And so basically they have to come to me and tell me their energy drivers and drains. They have to tell me what they're good at and what they suck at. They have to be able to tell me their past couple jobs of what's going on."

"On every interview loop there's one person, who is not the hiring manager, who doesn't report to the hiring manager, who's not the recruiting manager... and they are on the interview loop and they're a Bar Raiser, which means when we get to the debrief meeting, they will run that meeting, not the hiring manager, not the recruiter, they will run the meeting."

"It's not really about is this person good or bad or whatever, it's is this person's skillset and context to the problem that is really needed... how can we be a little bit more thoughtful about what the actual skillset needs off this type of team?"

"We are moving out of the era of the specialists and into the era of the generalists... I would also say, are they a generalist when they're a problem solver?"

"What are three to five adjectives that define this culture? What's the biggest problem in this culture... Is it ever going to get fixed? How could I come in and maybe help that?"

"I would hire someone who is willing to take intro to statistics course. And it doesn't matter if they've had the experience to go wild or not. I think it really is, can they focus on the right opportunity rather than the most flashy thing?"

"I think evidence that they actually have thought about it. As per I said earlier, that they've done research, that they have opinions, that they care about it. Right? Sometimes when people answer questions, you can just tell that it's really superficial, and they haven't put much care or soul into their answers."

"I'm an intellectually very fearless person, and I have to say when I hire young people, I look for that because I think that's a very important quality if one wants to make a difference, is that when you want to make a difference, you have to accept that you're creating something new or you're diving into something new."

"We're very much looking for people that are embracing these tools and that are eager to try and learn from it. ... I'm much more keen on looking for that college grad who just really is eager to learn about these tools and open to it, or even the veteran who has embraced these tools and figured it out."

"The seniority gap is really rough... what you do in response typically is, you promote a lot of people internally... But it's a problem because suddenly people are solving problems through trial and error... you want to keep it roughly in balance... 50-50, whatever."

"Everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people. Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience."

"Unfortunately, professionals with a lot of years of experience from established companies, they don't have this strong urge to change status quo, which by the way will require toil, tears, and sweat. And that's why even if a candidate doesn't have a lot of years of experience, but they love building things, they've done it, they worked with engineers maybe by the way, maybe in their own startup or one of the best profiles that I've seen is a tech co-founder."

"One of the great sources is actually looking into products and apps that we love ourselves. So if someone built a great product, then it's likely a high performer. So usually we provide some great products in specific areas that are more important for us to the sourcing team and they just try to source targeting those companies."

"we have to build all of this technology in order to measure it, like thousands of signals on all of our workers, thousands of signals on every project, every task. We know at the end of the day, if you are good at writing poetry versus good at writing essays versus great at writing technical documentation... We are looking at your keyboard strokes. We are looking how fast you answer things. We are using reviews, we are using code standards"

"But second of all, we do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on, because this company is not for everybody."

"It's also interesting that there's a really high demand for ex-founders now, for those people that truly have a lot of agency and high autonomy... the failed startup founders are now hot demand for a lot of these AI companies."

"There is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody."

"If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team."

"I really like to balance product teams with homegrown product managers, who really get the product... with product managers who've come from other companies, and have done it, and can bring a little bit more of that product manager rigor... I always push the leads to hire people who don't look like them."

"At Netflix we try really hard to say we're looking for the new perspective or the person who's actually going to make us stronger as a team. So thinking about additive skills, additive perspectives, people who are going to push our thinking on something."

"I'm usually looking for the person who would be better in my role than I am in my role. So I often ask people what would their priorities be, what would they do differently if they had my job."

"Find out what month one looks like with them. If month one is them just doing intake calls and learning about the company... you're not going to necessarily want to partner with an agency that needs a three-month ramp up cycle."

"Ask them for a couple recent blogs or releases, whatever they tend to go for, and read those. And, of course, wins too. You want to see what kind of stories they're getting, but that's a little more obvious."

"I think having the right business model experience is almost more important than having industry experience or experience with that audience. And I think often people are like, I need someone who is marketed to HR or marketed to construction or that specific. And my response is you, you're going to really narrow your set up people with that, and also it doesn't matter as much because great marketers learn the audience and learn the product quickly."

"You want the first marketer to be an expert in one of those three areas that I mentioned, product marketing, content marketing, growth marketing. And you want them to be proficient in another one, the second T. But you want them to be able to set strategy and know how to hire contractors across all of them. And so the promise land of hiring a first marketer, they are a pie shape marketer."

"I think I want to see that they've worked on a team that's early enough where they are not siloed into their specific role. Because what happens at leader stage companies or at public companies is when you're a product marketer, you don't see what's going on in the rest of marketing at all."

"For us, and even if the folks were hiring us, hiring people that don't care about the titles, and they don't care about... they really are motivated by just working on cool things, and are chucking their ego at the door."

"The biggest thing I see particularly at higher levels is people talk about what they have done but not why it mattered. They don't talk about the impact. See, a leader is not hiring someone to just do work. They're hiring someone because they have a problem or a need."

"We look for people who have a very strong desire to have impact... I look for people who can think deeply, so I'll go super deep into a decision, a tradeoff that they had to make."

"When I'm interviewing any of those kinds of candidates, I am looking for leadership skills. Can they do inspired communication of a vision? I do look for product strategy skills... I look for people who are proactive, results oriented."

"The first PM at every company has been someone who's either been an analyst or an engineer or a designer who's worked there already and they just move from their role to being a PM. Why? Because many cases, the role of the PM is actually to be the liaison between the founder, founders and the engineering team."

"Look at best of class companies or companies that are best of class at that function in the similar space... You don't hire the person, the head of marketing at these companies. You hire the person who's reporting to them, the lieutenant."

"A founder of a young company should spend I think two hours a day hiring... one hour a day doing the reach outs... The second hour should be devoted to actually meeting one or two people on a daily basis."

"The thing that we probably believe to be true that not that many people agree with us on is that the management team is really where we think all the alpha comes from. You can't get the industry wrong... but you also don't have to be perfect on the industry. You have to have a good enough industry and then a world-class management team."

"First of all, we made sure we hired people that were really excited to be there, right? They wanted to build Airbnb and they were really excited to work on Airbnb. That was the most important thing. Of course people had other offers, but I think you can figure out from those offers are you excited to be here or not."

"We made a pretty big push in something we call skills-first hiring. This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences into a set of skills, and by that we could help them really start balancing the marketplace with a much different system."

"I do like to ask people what the most complex thing they ever built was. I just love to understand mostly, what do they gravitate to? Is there something you gravitate to? And two, are they able to simplify it? I think those are two really important skills."

"I just interview for three things... are you a curious problem solver and can you articulate that verbally? Can you work across people? Are you humble enough to work across and are you a good leader?"

"One of the things that we do during the interview process for designers specifically and product people... is they do a project for us at the end. So the last five finalists will do a project for us. We'll pay them to do the project, they'll have a week to do it, they'll do it, and then I'll critique it with them. Even if I love it, I will push back in certain areas."

"Those first couple reps have to be people you would buy your own product from. That's it... when you go out as a first time founder and interview 30 reps... wait and interview 30 sales reps."

"One hint more than anything else, trust... got to hire someone whose last product was harder to sell. This is so important. This is a recipe for utter disaster. If you've, take someone in sales and their last product was easier to sell, they will have none of the skills to sell your product."

"What is a risk you regret not taking, why, and what did you learn about yourself?"

"The candidate poll must match where you want the team to go. It's not a down funnel problem, it is an up funnel problem. And where you have to just make sure that for each role you're comfortable with the distribution of people and backgrounds in your candidate pool."

"An important part of the case study is that it's actually too complex for people to have all of the answers upfront... seeing how people react to that is really indicative of how deeply they understand a new problem or how quickly or how mentally agile they are."

"I really look for that curiosity and that self-motivation to do it without being told. ... The person that has that curiosity, something seems off, something doesn't really make sense and goes and proactively looks into what that is."

"Seeing how people react to being told they're wrong is a really important signal in my opinion. Seeing how people respond, how they're able to take new information and pivot, how they're able to make a decision."

"I would look at, do the co-founders get along? Are these people committed? And if a founder would get defensive, that was always a bad sign."

"I would look at other things about founders. When we'd have these 10-minute interviews, I would look at, do the co-founders get along? Are these people committed? Do they really know about their product? Do they care? Are they going to quit their job? Or are they telling us that they are going to quit their job, but really aren't? All these little social cues that I'd try to pick up on."

"If a founder would get defensive, that was always a bad sign, always a bad sign. The best founders would say, 'Gosh, I have thought about it and here's what I figured out.' Or, they just have this almost a tennis match and a conversation rather than closing up and feeling like, oh, this person's interrogating me. You could just sort of, the open-mindedness, the flexible-mindedness of people was really important."

"One founder, once we asked a question and one person started to respond and the other founder put his arm in front of him and said, 'I'll answer that question.' And it was just so weird that he wouldn't let his co-founder speak. We'd have situations where we'd call people like hackers in a cage, where it's kind of obvious there'd be a business founder, business person, who had clearly convinced a programmer to join the team. They were given, the programmer was given, very little equity and just we called them programmers in a cage, like hackers in a cage."

"Earnestness is one of the most important because earnest, sort of to me, is bucketed with authenticity. And to be a successful startup founder, you have to care so much about the problem you're trying to solve, the users you're serving and being earnest about it is so key to success."

"Confidence means you can say, 'I've thought about that and I don't know the answer.' That's confidence. And they'll say, 'But here's what I do to try to figure it out. Here are my plans to address that.'"

"I love co-founders that have a history together; either they went to school together, they went to college together, work together, maybe they're siblings. Because when you have a long-term relationship, you trust each other and you know each other's weaknesses, and you're usually on the same page with your aspirations and everything. It's really scary when two founders get together just to start the startup and don't have any history."

"I was just reading that working backwards book about Amazon and they're in this chapter about basically their bar raisers thing and I share it with my partner who's the head of HR at a company. She's like, 'Yeah, this is sort of common sense hiring. They're just talking about de-biasing the hiring and having standards and having those linked into the jobs and just not rushing it.'"

"If you're making your first hire, you probably want them to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking, attribution, data visualization, and then campaign management. Number one, do they have a technical background?"

"I'll ask the question of, 'How many windows are there in New York City?'... One is can they think on their feet? I'm not actually looking for the correct answer... also from a client services point of view, I'm trying to see whether in a scenario where I've asked them something that they obviously probably weren't prepared for... they can compose themselves in a difficult situation."

"You should hire people who have already done the thing you need to have done next."

"If you were an outstanding performer in Job A, it is a high likelihood that in job B, someone associated with you in job A is going to pull you into the next thing and then pull you into the next thing and pull you into the next thing and you'll never do a job search 'cause you were great."

"We think there are three types of executives that startups end up hiring over time. We call them the architect, the optimizer, and the scaler."

"I've interviewed hundreds or thousands of researchers, and the way I usually approach that is you want a researcher who's got a Swiss army knife... give... a researcher, a pretty juicy, open-ended research question, and you want to see how they handle it, and a good answer is usually multi-method."

"Designers want to work with people who care about design... The first thing you could do is demonstrate a commitment to design. Make yourself out to be someone who cares about design... go and study it. Go and interview designers that work at companies. Go and try and follow the top designers on Twitter."

"If we were going to create a team and we're going to have a couple engineers and none of them are very good at thinking through product requirements or what the user angle is, we probably do need to supplement the team with somebody with that skill set."

"The key, I think, to keep in mind is it's easier to teach tools and process than it is taste and character, so I would certainly pay a lot of attention to that. Their hit rate for great judgment and great taste, and how they've honed that, even if they're not very experienced, just to see do they have that natural inclination for great things."

"Tell me what work you are most proud of. And the reason I ask that is because it helps me understand their taste and their judgment, what motivates them, what work they view as good and as a good outcome. It also helps me understand a little bit about what they like to do and where their gravity pulls them."

"I actually feel like maybe the pendulum shifted way too far now where it's the interview process is so structured. Everyone's doing all these mock. They know exactly what questions they're going to get. It's SAT prep. Everyone's ready. But we've missed out with can they do the job? Because it's like they can pass the interview, but can they do the job?"

"I think a great question... is how does the company define a product team? Because it answers so much. It says so much about culture, collaboration, decision-making, the role of product management. If there's one question and you could figure out what is this culture like, it would be asking that."

"I think another great question for candidates is to ask them to pick an example of something they've shipped recently and just talk about how it came to be. How did the bill become a law? Was it somebody in sales yelled and it got added to the backlog and it was the next thing? Is it a group of people together understanding customer user needs through discovery and ideating and trying some things and testing it?"

"I and the team interviewed every single person that joined the team and we were like, 'We want that person on the team. They want to be on the team.' And so people are totally bought in to the goal, mission, the way the team works, the other people they're going to be working with."

"We've been taking very slow steps on it that in almost the first year we didn't hire anyone... We never more than doubled in a year. And that's been our guideline that we shouldn't more than double."

"We do with all of the employees, we've been doing a paid work trial... they basically come as a mini contractor to the company, and we give them a very usually fairly vague problem statements. If you're an engineer, it's like, hey, there's this feature that needs to be built. How would you build it? Then go build it."

"High agency is something that we really look for, people that are not going to come in and wait for everyone else to allow them to do something, they're just going to see a problem and go do it... people that are happy with ambiguity."

"When you get to offer stage, I send an email with no more than eight bullet points and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join you, find yourself a A+ hire."

"Maybe all of our interviews should be about giving a task that they can only perform if they are very good at AI. And no matter what the job is, you make that the minimum criteria that if they cannot use that, leverage that, they'll become a liability in 5 years anyways."

"I also recently wrote a post about my favorite ref check question, which I think I would love to learn other people's favorite ref check questions."

"I think sometimes putting the most unlikely people who have an ounce of naivety to what it takes to win and succeed are the ones that are going to drive the biggest impact."

"I definitely look for people who have the ability to make decisions and move fast and not get worried about the outcome. That is the biggest learning in a startup. The secret is momentum and just keeping momentum... I look for just optimistic doers."

"Regardless of whether or not you're hiring, you should always be keeping a pulse on the market. That is the most important thing. And I think that should be the case for both candidates and folks that are hiring. Like, you never want to put yourself in a position where you have no idea what good looks like, whether that's from a company standpoint or from a candidate standpoint."

"I think especially for founders that haven't hired for this caliber of talent in the past, it's really easy to be distracted by shiny objects and look at huge names. You want to find the CPOs of Google and YouTube or what have you because that seems like it would be such an incredible opportunity for brand recognition. And to an extent, it is. But the fact of the matter is, oftentimes those individuals are pretty far from the work and have a great team of executors that they've put into place that are actually the ones that are in the weeds."

"I would say the general advice is who is going to be best for this specific role at this specific time, not necessarily who is the best talent in the world or in the market. Those are two very, very different questions to ask."

"It is important to dig pretty deep and ask the hard questions. ... Why would I not hire this person? What are their biggest weaknesses? And then if they give you the typical, 'Oh, if they work too hard,' it's like, no, tell me more. What are their actual weaknesses? What are things that we should be really cognizant of? Would you hire this person again? Would you report to this person?"

"Back channel references I think will always provide a greater source of truth than provided. It's similar to an Instagram Reel as opposed to the photos you're tagged in. That's the way I think of it. It's like this is what you want the world to see or think of you as, and then these are what your peers and your direct reports and the people around you actually say about the work that you did during this time."

"I'm looking for what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once. Maybe it was work related, maybe not work related."

"One of them is when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them, that is such a strong signal because if you think of what just happened, the leader who knows exactly how good this person you're talking to is... they would never do that unless this person was really, really good."

"Finding people who are high agency and work with urgency, if I was hiring five people today, those are some of the top two characteristics that I would look for in people because you can take on the world if you have people who have high agency and not needing to get 50 people's different consensus."

"One of the frameworks that I use for this is SPOTAC... it's that people are smart, passionate, optimistic, tenacious, adaptable, and kind. Those five things. Six, can't even count... The framework is super useful to evaluating people."

"At Agoda, we used to pay a psychologist $5,000 for every single PM we interview... it would be a six-hour psych assessment and they would tell me what your strengths are, not just that it would be an IQ component."

"Early on one of the first questions I would ask people is, what are the KPIs that you're willing to commit to? So if someone's only willing to commit to lead numbers, that's not good enough. They need to be able to commit to closed one revenue KPRs to really show that they care about the business's bottom line."

"A really good way to also test for that is, this is more on the case study process, but asking someone to come up with a strategy with $0, with $10,000 and maybe a hundred thousand dollars to see if they're going to be able to scale with you. And to see how are they thinking about with different levels of spend and what are they willing to commit to at different levels of spend."

"When you get into needing a CPO, it's like, hey, we actually have to pull together a product strategy that's all encompassing. We have to have great communication between product and the executive team."

"Core to how we interview too, is actually, we have people onsite for two days, and do a project with us, a work test project. And that has worked really well, that increasingly you're finding that... It gives you two days of seeing a real work product, and it doesn't have to be incredibly time-enhancing other teams from time."

"For a standard PM role, I always make people do work... I really use that as a way to see into how someone thinks, the quality of the solutions that they bring, how they communicate. There's just so much bundled up in giving someone an actual problem, ideally to pick, not one that's assigned to them."

"Whether someone was able to tell a compelling story was huge, especially at Slack, which was a very product-driven company, a very narrative-driven company. If you were going to present data, it needed to be within a very specific context. And it wasn't a company where the number always won. It was a company where the story always won."

"I feel like they screened really hard for a few traits in particular. One is like very independent-minded people who weren't afraid to push back. Two is people with broader intellectual interests... And then yeah, I think three is just people who are very intensely competitive."

"You ask questions like, what's the hardest you've ever worked to get something done and why? And that does differentiate a lot of people, a lot of people don't actually have a great answer to that."

"We try to maximize the number of empowered people who can ship... people who can make stuff happen. And then you can add ammunition around them, which is people helping those people. ... we try to maximize the number of empowered people who can ship because that's how you have a small team and still get the ton done."

"Bridgewater thinks of people in three dimensions, their skills, their attributes, and their values. Most organizations think about people in terms of just their skills. But it makes sense that people have attributes and values"

"We would pull all of this forward into the interview process and talk about it and basically say like, 'Hey, if this is not how you think, that's okay. We're not better than you, you're not better than us, it's just this is how we do things here.'"

"Here's an amazing question I got given recently... for referral calls... "What feedback will I be giving this person in their first performance review?" It's an amazing question, because the person can't dodge it. There's an answer. And, it's incredibly enlightening."

"I'm a big fan of doing screens, so we actually have a written screen that we do with folks, where it's the Google Doc that has a dozen or so biographical questions that we allow people to answer. You'd be shocked at how well it screens people, 57% people won't do it."

"If you want to get references... you want to say, 'I'm about to hire Lenny. Okay, if it would be a huge mistake if I didn't bring him on, if you think he's amazing, then call me back. Otherwise, don't bother.' And that gets around all the legal blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's just it cuts through."

"I ask them, 'Would you enthusiastically rehire this person for the same role?' Which is the question we always asked at Stripe. And when the answer is no to that... this is not going to work."

"Curiosity is a very important quality when I'm actually talking to my interviewers because I want to see that they are naturally curious to new things. They want to learn more about the new things and don't really get stuck with their own things. That's one thing. And the other thing is the discipline... One of the good example that is the ability to prioritize because I don't believe one thing is everybody can do everything."

"The first mistake I made was... we're trying to grow too fast and sometimes as a hiring manager I have to compromise the standard we're trying to hire. So that's the mistakes I think I made first and I think nobody should repeat that mistake is you need to always run for the quality rather than the quantity."

"It might be less about me evaluating the- the- the market need for this particular idea, but it's what's the thought process and how did this founder come to these product ideas and these insights. And so, I think having a product management background is helpful for that."

"I generally value the reference check over interview signals. If I had to stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? The reference check is the top of the list. Those people, they worked with this person sometimes for years, their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios it's just like never going to compare what a good reference check will give you."

"Gusto does this thing in their hiring calls. So you get an offer from Gusto and apparently when you get on the offer call of congratulations, you got an offer, instead of just meeting the recruiter, which is what most companies do, they have the entire group of people that interviewed you join the call and they all say something about why you're amazing and you should join Gusto."

"We ended up settling on this one called PSHE, and it comes from old mentor of mine, Quentin Clark... And it stands for Problem, Solution, How, Execution, PSHE... If you're a junior product manager, what happens? You get handed a problem. You get handed a solution. You get handed the how... and all you have to do is execute... At some point you're senior enough that you tell us the problems and you say, 'Hey. I know you told me to go work on activation, but actually I think our issue is brand,'"

"I try really hard to do is to draw contrasts... I'll say things like, 'When you think about this person, and I'll give you four different personas. Someone who's regularly coming up with the problems that the team should be focused on. Someone who given a set of problems is constantly solving them in this really creative way. The person that is just really good at getting a team moving. Or the person who can take a playbook and execute it with high precision and high quality and stuff.'"

"Especially at the senior levels, I always ask them, when was one time that you failed and what did you learn from it? I've seen that folks who has either say that they've never failed or they're trying a success story as a failure story are usually, they're disingenuous or have not had the depth of experience."

"Every single time I've taken a job where it turned out that I was working with people who had a different set of values or working styles than I had, I knew. You tell yourself that, at least in my case, I tell myself a story about why the thing I suspect might be the case isn't the case. But you do this in your personal life all the time."

"I'm a big fan of case studies, live case studies. I think you learn a whole boatload about how someone thinks on the fly, how they react to constraints... The other one I like to ask is around something that people have taught themselves, tried to get at a growth mindset."

"Every time that you hire someone new, mark your calendars for 30 days down the road and ask yourself one question, knowing what I know today, would I hire this person? If the answer is no, fire them immediately."

"Assuming XYZ person is going to leave, how sore are you going to feel?" And you will be surprised that they are going to tell you, "Oh, it's not a big deal." This is your confirmation."

"Speak with the reference... Would you hire him? Or would you hire her, right? So essentially at the end of the day you want to nail it into yes or no."

"I want the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity. Every hire is like a little bit of water, and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated."

"We only hire for a role if we're actually underwater for that function... I actually think this is a feature. When you hire for a role and you already have enough people there, you get a lot of weird politics that ultimately ends up happening. And it's not because people are bad people... they will go out and manufacture some other thing that they should go work on."

"One of the biggest dog whistles I hear is, when I ask people how hard are you willing to work, some people actually ultimately say, 'Hey, I work very smart.' And I basically ask them a question, 'If we have many smart people at our company that also work hard, what's the differentiator going to be? Are you just going to pull them down?'"

"If you are very patient, there's always some trade-off between speed and quality when hiring. And I remember especially for our first 10 people, we were just so patient and disciplined about finding some of the best people in the world."

"Speed becomes more important once you find the market opportunity, the market vacuum. ... once you know that there's so much more demand than you can handle, that's when you want to step on the gas and optimize for speed in a lot of ways."

"The kind of heuristic I have is if I ever think, should I fire this person even once, I should fire them immediately. It has always been a signal, at least for me, that when someone's a superstar, I can't imagine firing them."

"When I interview a growth PM or analyst, I will always ask, 'What is a experiment you launched that has a very unexpected result? And what did you do after that?'"

"Interviews are not a good predictor of performance. We know this. We know this from studies... what I really like to do is use this race car analogy. If I told you, 'Hey, I want to go hire the best race car driver,' there's not really that many questions you could ask them except for put them in the car."

"Our goal of interviews is to convince people not to join The Browser Company. If I have an interview with someone, I don't pitch them and say, 'What do you want to ask me? Anything you want? I'll be super honest, most people shouldn't want to work here.'"

"The fact we were willing to go all the way down the path and have someone super qualified but didn't meet the culture bar, for him was what pushed him over the edge to join the company."

"If you want to achieve a 10x outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field, it's maybe unlikely you're going to achieve that 10x outcome, because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done."

"In 6 months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person. It helps me and the person operate on a different level where the goal is not, did you hit this OKR? The Meta goal becomes, are we calibrating enough? Are we actually getting into a spot where in 6 months you're the one telling me what needs to be done?"

"I think there are five different types of product managers... Number one is the consumer PM... half designer, half product person... Another type... is the growth PM... half data scientist, half product person... The third type is what I call the GM PM or the business PM... half MBA, half product person... Another one... is the platform PM... deeply wired to build tools for other people... The last one... research PM. These are half researcher, half engineer, half product person."

"The question I asked has been the same one I've asked for years... think about one of the biggest mistakes you've made, truly, the more painful the better. And tell me what the mistake was. Describe to me the situation, and tell me actually how you actually think differently now, work differently as a result."

"Bring in people who know content and teach them process, as opposed to bringing in people who know process and trying to teach them content, because that's a bloody hard thing to do."

"We had a candidate who came and interviewed, he was a junior at MIT... we gave him an interview, and he did way better than almost any of the full-time candidates that we had ever talked to. And so, we said, hey, what do you think about taking some time off of school and working with us and building out Devin?"

"And so, we actually worked with him and basically hand wrote all of his rejection responses to each of the other companies, and worked with him on it to say, here's how you should say it in a way that's going to come off as that you really did appreciate the time with them"

"I can teach anyone how to do Google ads. I can teach anyone how to do Meta ads. That is not the hard part. It is the data part that is the hard part because there is so much noise going on in those accounts... what is the signal and what is the noise?"

"How many people have you fired? And tell me about each of the experiences."