Resumes Don't Build Companies

The right team can make the huge difference for you. And getting your team right is both a science and an art that you have to find for your— what works for your startup and hone that as much as you can. Now while people lead to the success of a startup, people can be actually number one reason that your startup will fail. I don't know if you guys have watched Professor Grier's video recently. She said that the number one reason your startup will fail is people issues. There's a book called Founder's Dilemma which says that 9 out of 10 startups are going to fail. And 2/3 of the failure happens because of the people issues. These could be fights between the co-founders. This could be disagreement between what product do you want to build? Who do you want to hire? Who do you want to, where do you want to sell? Who do you want to take investment from? Any of these problems can actually kill your startup. The speed, the quality of decision that you make, the commitment and consensus that you have for those decision will actually determine how innovative your startup is going to be and how fast can you scale your startup. At Zoom, actually, we have learned from our mistakes. In the beginning, there was a phase when we were hiring leadership team. We started going for very shiny objects. Just because the resume looked good, or these people come with the credentials, even when they did not match in the culture or the values for the company. These kind of mistakes can be very expensive for the company, especially at the leadership positions. Because not only these people impact their work, they actually impact the team's work and the hiring that happens in the startup. Fortunately for us, we corrected this problem pretty quickly. And today, we have built an amazing team.