Alexandr Wang warns that rapid hiring during growth phases often destroys high-performing teams. He argues against bringing in executives who immediately staff up aggressively, instead advocating for deep onboarding and small, verifiable changes. Founders need to stay involved in strategy to maintain their innovation edge.
Chapters
One of the things that you've talked about is a mistake that you made during the go go times of 2020 and 2021 around hiring and this notion that in order to scale you had to hire a ton. And it's something we saw with all of our portfolio companies. What were the lessons that you learned through that process and then how have you changed how you've done things afterward?
It feels very logical that more people equals better results and more people equals more stuff being done. But rather paradoxically, I think if you have a very high performing team and a very high performing org, it's nearly impossible to grow it dramatically without losing all of that high performance. A very high performing team of a certain size is almost like this very intricate sculpture and this interplay between all the people on the team. If you add a bunch of people into that, even if the people are great, it just screws the whole thing up. Startups work because you have very high performing teams and you want to keep those high performing teams intact as long as you possibly can. I think a common startup failure mode is that you have something that works, but everybody in the company is really junior. So then things are scaling, but all the wheels are kind of falling off. Your investors tell you, hey, you should hire some executives. So you go through the exec searches, you bring in exec and then you give the exec a lot of rope. And your execs say, hey, we need to hire a massive team for us to hit our results. And you're like, yeah, I mean, I'm pretty experienced. You seem really experienced. Like, let's do what you say. And the reality is like, I think this almost always results in ruin. I think that this isn't to say that you can't hire executives from the outside, but it's. But I think what you need to do when you hire executives from the outside is they really get steeped in how the company works. And before they make any major sweeping suggestions, they get into the rhythm and the operations of the company and they understand why, why does the whole thing work in the first place? Why are the things that are working, working? And then they, they make thoughtful suggestions initially. You know, they take small steps and you sort of like you trust and verify each of these small steps and eventually maybe they can make sweeping suggestions. And this is where we've made mistakes is like you're not buying some magical bag of goods that is going to bring this magic formula into your business that will like all of a sudden make the whole thing work. You know, the other thing on the flip side, there's a founder fantasy which is, oh, I'm going to just like hire a bunch of incredible execs. They'll do all the stuff I don't want to do and I'm going to be able to sit back and like just sort of watch the cogs happen and watch the machine work. And that's also extremely unrealistic because the reason that you are a good founder CEO is because you make very good decisions over and over and over again over an extended period of time. And to pull yourself out of those decision making loops is, you know, would be kind of crazy.
That's a pattern we've seen a lot which is I'm going to hire executives, I'm going to step back a bit and then it's like, oh shit. Realization that like, hey, some big decisions go wrong and like, wait, this is the point of me being here.
Yeah. I think that a lot of startups and a lot of companies are valuable because of an innovation premium. You know, investors believe that founder led companies are going to out innovate the market. And so your job is to out innovate the market. So you better be in the strategic decisions.
