The Three People Your Startup Needs

On the topic of talent, I've got this little mini framework, 3 kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people. One is you have the creatives, and these are people that start things. They have ideas, they have 180 ideas an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. So they're the starters. Then you have the completers. Those are the people that can make a list of like, here are the things that need to get done in order for us to ship a product or do whatever. And often those folks are at odds. Like the idea folks are kind of really frustrated with the completers that are like, I'm just trying to check a box and make our— it's like, Yes, but I'm doing this thing and it's not good enough yet. You have that tension, and that's what brings in the third person, which is the collaborator. And the collaborator is really good at communicating, is really good at bridging gaps across departments, across individual people, and kind of pulling it all together. And usually you're looking for someone that has at least like a 9 or 10 on one of those dimensions, a 7 or an 8 on another one, and usually very low on the third.