Peter Sorgenfrei argues that fast-growing companies should hire for intellectual capacity, not specific skills or credentials. The ability to process information and learn quickly matters more than what someone already knows or where they went to school.
So I'm often asked, who's the most important person to hire, or how do you hire when you're building fast-growing companies? And the short answer is you hire for intellectual capacity. So you try to find people who are able to handle large amounts of disparate information quickly and make something of it, even if they don't have all the answers. So that's the most important hire when you're thinking about who to bring into a company. It matters less what skills they have, it matters less which school they went to, What matters is the CPU, how intellectually capable are they.
