Keith Rabois argues early-stage startups should hire for 10x or 100x value creation, not flawlessness. The best candidates have sharp, peaked skills and a "screw loose" that drives creativity. A zero-defect hiring mindset filters out transformative talent by fixating on weaknesses instead of potential.
Chapters
So when you start a company, your company isn't really worth much. In fact, it was probably worth zero, regardless of what investors tell you, it rounds to zero. So you really haven't created any value. And so the number one and most important thing you can do when you're recruiting people to the team is to find people that can 10x the value or 100x the value or 1,000x the value, because it's the only way you become an important and interesting company. And so what you want to find are people that have the upside potential of creating value. These people typically have a non-perfectly distributed skill set. They tend to spike in some dimensions and be awesome at some things, and they tend to have a screw loose in other places. And the problem with, if you try to avoid any mistakes in hiring, is it's very easy to identify the flaws and the weaknesses of candidates, and it's not as easy to see the 10X and 100X upside. So you wind up, if you use a zero defect approach to hiring, hiring only the people that really don't have the 10X or 100X upside. It's a little bit like investing. When someone pitches us on an angel investment or an early seed round as a VC, it's very easy to figure out all the things that are wrong with the company. That doesn't take much effort at all. The hard part and the difficulty and the challenge to be a world-class investor is to imagine what can go right and see that clearly, crisply, succinctly before other people.
