Jessica Mah: Making Your First Hires

But had you ever hired people before? No, I never hired anyone before. And so how did you do this? I mean, what kind of people were you looking for and how did you hire them? And what did you find out? Well, I haven't always hired that well. Like when I was in college, I always read about entrepreneurs saying only hire A players. Sure, that's what you did, right? Only hired a players. Well, I, so I thought. But when you're a first time entrepreneur, you don't really know who an A player is. Don't they come with a sign? You think they do or you interview them and you think, wow, they got perfect grades in college and they're super smart. They aced all their questions. So a players were their grades. Well, they're really smart, but doesn't mean they're a perfect fit for your company. Why not? You mean you don't just hire for intelligence? Well, back then I only did. Ah, wasn't that the Google model? Well, I, I really thought that hiring for intelligence was the most important thing, but it's really the other non tangible things. Well, tell me what you learned. Like whether or not they could meet deadlines, whether or not they could build a product with a high level goal in mind, whether or not they could go out and survey the customers themselves, whether or not they could build a product without requiring a full spec that you're given in an engineering assignment in college. Wow. And these things you don't necessarily learn in college. And so if you were interviewing people today, would you know how to ask those questions? I wouldn't necessarily ask questions to figure that out. How would you figure it out? A lot of these things you just have to try. You have to bring them in for a few days and just watch them in the battlefield. So did you make any hiring mistakes? I made quite a few. And how do you fix your mistakes? You recognize them, you accept them and you try to part ways with the person who was a mistake. So you never hired people. So that meant you had never fired people either. Right. How was that? I remember like a few months after we had raised our million dollars, one angel investor asked me if I had ever fired anyone before. And I proudly told him no, I never have had to. And he said, well, you shouldn't be smiling because you probably hired someone wrong and you just haven't realized it yet. And that really scared, that really scared me. And so you've now done that. Right. Like I feel like if you're a first time entrepreneur, instead of just trying to only make a player hire. Maybe it's better to think about hiring in terms of trying and then firing if you realize that you made a mistake, because that's just inevitable and you can't really learn who's a good fit until you try lots of people.