Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a really long time to hire people

The received wisdom is work really hard to hire the best people. You're like, gee, thanks, I was going to do the opposite. But now that you've said that, work really hard to hire the best people. And so I guess the question is, to what lengths should you go? And what does that actually mean in practice? And in practice it means being okay, waiting a really long time to hire people. It took me six months to hire the first two people. So a person per quarter, even though we had this kind of network already and knew all these people, we managed like one every three months. And then in I think the six months after that, we maybe hired another three or four people on that order. If you just think about the smartest people you know and you want to get them to work on your thing, I mean, chances are the smartest people.

You know are working already.

Yeah.

And they like their job.

They have like pretty good paths ahead of them.

Right.

There are multiple people at Stripe now today who took us several years to hire. I can think off the top of my head of five people who took three plus years to hire. The big thing that people have to keep in mind instead of early stage company recruiting is just you have to be way more persistent and be okay with it taking way longer than any sane or reasonable person could think it should take.

The vicious cycle is that you're going so slowly when it's the first two or three people and you're like, holy smokes, if we could just get another set of hands. But you don't want to do it. But we talk a lot in this class about compound interest and the value of compounding interest. Like if you get just one great person, that makes it marginally easier to get the next great person.

So I think that dynamic in spades. And then kind of. Secondly, I think kind of another way to think about it that makes the kind of the importance of it and the potency kind of clearer is that you have to kind of imagine the tree of sort of all the people this person will hire. And so rather than just thinking about it as kind of do I want this person or not? It's like, do I want this person and the 50 people who I think that they will hire. Because even if they don't literally hire 50 people, they will be kind of so influential in determining sort of the self selection of those 50 people.