Bastian Lehmann argues that early marketplace founders should do operations work themselves and hire engineers first. Engineers bring structured problem-solving that outperforms traditional ops hires, and he's skeptical of early manager positions in favor of expert-led, functional teams.
Hey, Simba, do you wanna come on?
Bastien, thank you so much for talking to us today. Really appreciate it. Got a question for you around hiring. Do you think that early stage marketplaces need like a pure ops person as part of like the founding team or one of the first few hires? And the reason why I mentioned this is because like as software has become more commoditized, distribution's everything, especially for marketplaces. But when you talk to a lot of VCs, most of them are SaaS investors. They really talk about your first few hires should be just engineers. What are your thoughts on that to get that person that just does the things that don't scale, whether it's like launching a market, handing out flyers and doing all these different things?
I think that's your job and I think you need to do all the things that you, that you think you need to hire someone for and you just need to figure it out and you should just focusing on hiring engineers.
Just hiring engineers.
But I wouldn't, I would never think about any of my co-founders or engineers just as engineers. I think an engineer is just a person who has an incredibly structured way of thinking about problems and who has a great way of breaking down challenges. And these are almost always superior to how a lot of other people are taught to think. I give you an idea. When Steve Jobs built it, built the first almost fully computer and robot assembly of computers in the United States from '82 to '84 for the Macintosh. He had initially 2 teams working on that. The one team was a team of engineers that were construction engineers, and they had done this before. And they had all these permutations and assumptions why something should be this way and this way. And then the second team who ultimately was in charge of the whole setup and ran that part of manufacturing was a bunch of software engineers. And they approached every one of these steps very differently. They didn't assume that the robot can do certain things or not. They didn't assume industry standards. And by the way, this is not to say that somebody who knows something is an idiot. It's just to say that the way that you approach a problem as an engineer and the way that you that you can analyze it, in my opinion, is extremely superior when it comes to complex challenges. So I don't care if it's an operational problem. I had great engineers being GMs and run markets, and they have done often a better job than people that on paper had a more related experience. I'm in general very I don't think that an operations person is necessarily someone who is a good hire in general. I've seen very few. I don't— I think operations people are ultimately managers, and I hate managers. I can't stand a manager. I don't think you need managers. You should stay away from them as long as you can. Nobody wants to work for a manager. You should build a functional org. Just like Apple. Experts should lead experts. Nobody needs a manager to manage people. Turns out teaching someone how to manage people is the easier thing to learn. It's way easier to teach someone how to manage people than to teach someone computer science. So let's teach the computer science person how to teach people, and you have an expert leading a group of experts. Operations is often this position where early on, You tend to hire people that work with a lot of other people previously, and then by default, that makes them managers. And they see systems by building groups of people that do certain things. And an engineer would simply look at the same challenge but say like, okay, what can I build here that helps me achieve that? So I guess that makes it clear what my preference is.
