Short excerpt from a YouTube panel where founders discuss how to persuade people to join startups despite high failure rates. Speakers emphasize that uncertainty and potential impact attract candidates, the true scale of personal sacrifice is often overstated, and hiring should favor candidates who are authentic about motivations and resilient in uncertainty.
So the question is, most startups are not the iPhone. You can't guarantee that people's grandchildren are going to remember this because most startups fail. How do you convince people to sort of make sacrifices to join a startup?
I think part of the way in which it resonates with people is because it's not guaranteed. Right. If it were guaranteed, that would be boring. And so it's the sort of. There is the prospect of sort of affecting this outcome, but nothing more than that potential to the sort of not seeing their families or kids or whatever. I mean, startups often do involve sort of longer hours in the beginning, but I think. Well, I think that that particular story is probably somewhat overstated. I guess it was. I think Scott Forstall was trying to recruit these people. But I mean, even though startups, especially in the earlier days, tend to involve somewhat longer working hours, I think there's kind of this tendency to exaggerate it and sort of. I mean, it's like the startup version of phishing. Like every startup thinks they worked even more insane hours than the next one back in the early days. Like, we literally never sleeped or slept rather for two years. So I don't know, I think that realistically for most people, it's not that big a sacrifice. Right. Maybe on average, being really realistic about it, people work two hours more on average per day. It's certainly a sacrifice, but it is not foregoing all pleasure and enjoyment for the next half decade.
Yeah, I mean, I think even the iPhone wasn't the iPhone before it got done. Right. So, I mean, no smart person you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future that only you have and that joining is a guaranteed thing. And in fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you probably shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test about uncertainty in the future. But I think it's fair to say what's exciting and where you think it can go and where it's going to be hard and chart your best plan and then tell them why their role in it could be instrumental, because it is. I really liked what you said. If you tell people, hey, we're going to go to Mars, it attracts the best people and then you're incrementally closer to getting to Mars and they know that going in. What I would discourage doing is just whitewashing all of that. And if people are joining because they want, oh, I want all the certainty and guarantee of working at Google plus the perk of working in a small startup with more email and transparency. That's a really, really negative sign. And for example, when I interview people, they'll often say, oh, I'm really passionate at what you're doing. And then I'm like, well, where else are you interviewing? And they'll just list like seven companies that have nothing to do with each other except they're sort of at the same stage route. They're like, I love the problem of discovery. So I'm interviewing at Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber. Now I'm also putting into my resume into Google X, into that part of the division. And that's a sign that they're probably not being authentic with which they care about. And those folks, often when things get really hard, they won't stick it out and work through it because they were really signing up for an experience, not for achieving a goal.
I think the other thing that motivates people a great deal, in addition to sort of the prospect of affecting some outcome, is just the personal development angle and that a startup, just because it's much more likely staffed, it's kind of a. It's much less forgiving, right? In that, like, even if you're the best person in the world, you're not going to. Well, whether or not you're the best or the worst person in the world, you're probably not going to significantly alter Google's trajectory, right? Whereas if you sort of really want to benchmark yourself and sort of see how much of a contribution and an impact you can make, and I think that prospect is quite compelling to a lot of the best people, then a startup is a much better place to go test that.
