When a board asks about hiring progress, they're really checking if your capital is flowing to engineering and product, and whether your leadership can scale the company over the next two years. They want to see measurable progress toward staffing goals and a team with the right mindset to execute.
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Hey, how's our velocity? Are we going fully remote yet? Are you serious? Our team's only this size? I thought we actually had headcount for double this. What does the board really mean when they say this? What we're gonna do today is actually we're gonna walk through like what they really mean when they're asking you those things. And once you know what they actually mean, like, what are we going to do about it? How are we actually going to get ahead of it? And how do we actually address it? Boards fundamentally, when we actually— when they have the capital, they want to invest in engineering. Engineering, R&D, and product design, all these things are actually value they're actually creating for the company over time. And so given the choice, they'd love to actually go and invest in those areas, right? They actually give you ability to actually squash competitors, out-innovate competitors, or actually defend against someone else that actually might out-innovate you. So when a board's actually asking about hiring, they've already come to the conclusion that we need to do this, and they're trying to actually see, like, are we making progress? There's also a second-order thing going on when they're actually asking these questions, which is they're trying to figure out, do we have the right guy or gal, right? Is this person actually responding correctly in the language that they wanna hear. Now, are they actually thinking that directly in that way? No, it's more subconscious. They wanna actually figure out, is this the guy or gal that's gonna help us scale to that level we need to be a year or two from now?
