Bastian Lehmann explains how he hired Postmates' first CFO Kristen Schaefer through a merit-based data challenge, then argues for mixing seasoned talent with hungry junior engineers. He advocates for "T-shaped people" with deep expertise in one area and broad empathy across disciplines, citing IDEO's model as a template for building collaborative teams.
Questions this video answers
Lehmann describes using merit‑based challenges (e.g., giving a CSV to a financial analyst) to assess fit, hiring a mix of experienced veterans and hungry juniors, and seeking T‑shaped individuals who combine deep expertise with broad empathy.
Hey, Amanda, I saw you raise your hand, and then Michael, we'll try to get to you after, 'cause I know you added a question.
Hi, so that's a good segue to my question about hiring. So how did you look at the hiring plan at the beginning, though, when trying to determine what those key hires were gonna be, when it's right to pull the trigger, and then evaluating quickly whether they're a good fit?
I assume early at Postmates is what's interesting, right? So I can give you, I can give, maybe I give you early at Postmates and then also TipTop because obviously I do things differently now. I think we're, we're, we're, we're pretty good at hiring in both companies. Obviously, we hire almost exclusively engineers in, in either companies. We had a financial analyst very early on at Postmates. Her name was Kristen Schaefer. She would become the CFO. It was a recommendation from Founders Fund. And we gave her this very unfair task. All we gave her was a CSV dump of data, anonymized delivery data. It had geocoordinates in it. It had free text in it, had timestamps in it. And we were like, well, you're not an engineer. You can't really help here much, but maybe you can spend a weekend and look at this and tell us something that we don't know. And boy, she came and blew us all away in a presentation that started just me sitting in a little conference room we had. And at the, after an hour, everyone was in that room and said, oh, okay, I'm taking some notes on how to, how to, how to look at data in different ways. And we hired her on the spot. But I think it was so obviously based on merit. But we, I like to, I like to have a mix of people in the early days of a company. And that is you have a lot of talented people that have done great things before and can bring that experience to your company. And then you have a lot of young people that are extremely hungry to learn. and to become great at what they're doing. And I think if you put them together, great things will happen. Now, here's another way to look at a person who has experience in something and has worked at great companies before. So if you look at the Stanford Design School and Peter Kelley, I think it is either Peter or David, they're brothers. But I think Peter Peter Kelly founded the Stanford Design School and David Kelly, both of them together founded IDEO, which is, which is a, at least was for a long time, probably the world's greatest interactive design studio. They helped create beautiful products, worked with Apple on a lot of things. And they have this definition of someone that they almost hire exclusively and they call it a T-shaped person. I talked about this before. So a T-shaped person is someone who has a broad empathy across a lot of disciplines and a passion, but a deep understanding in one or 2 areas. So what that means is it does 2 things. If you have a deep understanding in one or 2 areas, it gives you a lot of confidence in certain topic matters. And if you at the same time have a broad empathy across a lot of other disciplines, you can appreciate them. But because you have deep expertise in one or two that are not maybe the same of another person, you also appreciate and you have the confidence to work with someone who has expertise in one of the other areas, but who also has a broad empathy across many disciplines, right? So you ultimately get people that are confident and very open to working with other confident and very knowledgeable people in certain fields. And IDEO had— has done this, has done this to the point that they construct the teams that they have. There are some designers, people from fields of psychology and sort of all breeds, and they work together. And early Apple employees had that. So, and you can actually look for that, right? You can see if somebody is interested in engineering and also has an appeal for the arts or whatever else you want to sort of find out about them. And it's, in my opinion, these are wonderful people to hire. So when I say somebody who's done great things at great companies, you can see how that's a T as well, right? Because it gives you a lot of confidence if you have built great things at great companies. And now if you come where the startup, you sort of reflect some of that confidence, yet you have this openness to work with other people. There is probably an online definition of the T-shaped person and there is a book, I think, the Faces or 10 Faces of Innovation or the IDEO Book of Innovation. That's the first one. Every founder should read it just period for team dynamics.
