Sam Altman says scaling startups often hire aggressively while losing top people. CEOs should spend monthly one-on-ones with their best 5-10 employees, expand their responsibilities yearly, and raise compensation proactively. Neglecting retention costs you your key lieutenants.
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When you're sort of a seed series a company, you spend a huge amount of effort recruiting, but almost no effort retaining talent. And that is right at the beginning. But if you don't shift to viewing retaining talent as much of your job as recruiting talent, you eventually have some level of a disaster on your hands. Zuckerberg once said when he spoke at YC that he'd only hire people that he'd report to if the roles were reversed. And if you're hiring people that are that good, which you should be doing, they have as many opportunities as you do. So if you were thinking about, oh, what am I going to do after this company, or am I in the best role I could be in, they're thinking about the same thing. And so if you don't make the role good enough that you yourself would stay in it, then you have a hard time retaining your best people for a long period of time. So the things I think that people need to start doing as they shift from the seed series A to later than that to retain talent. One the thing that your best five or 10 people crave the most is time with you and time with the CEO. And that is something that as people get busier, they spend less and less time on. I think some of the very best CEOs in our portfolio, every month they will take out for a one on one dinner or drinks or something each of their best 10 people every month. And this is a huge time commitment. If you think about you get 30 dinner slots in a month. This is a really big thing to do. And I think that actually works because that is the thing that these people really crave and that they really start to lose. And they want you to ask them what you think they should be doing and listen to them and have a personal connection that's super important. I think another thing is giving people new tasks. One of the fun things about being CEO is that even if you have a little bit of add, that's okay because you get to do new things all the time. It's tempting to slot VPs into these functional roles they get really good at and then not move them around or not give them more and more responsibility. So I think if you stop giving people more responsibility, they will eventually leave. If they get to take on new tasks every year or additional tasks every year, they're happier. And then the last thing is around comp. I think most founders are very bad about proactively re upping to the level that they should. Their top, you know, five or 10 lieutenants but this is one transition that many of our companies have failed to make at some point or other is how important it is to retain talent.
