Ray Deck argues that seed-stage startups should hire talented people with weak resumes, using founder networks to spot overlooked talent. As you grow and move upmarket, switch to candidates with big-company credentials like Stanford degrees or Google experience for operational stability and credibility.
Hire great people with terrible resumes. I have seen a lot of startups go from the scrappy bootstrapping, we're hiring from the bottom, we're trying to figure out how to make a dollar go a long way, to all of a sudden they become funded and it's like we're going to hire out of Stanford and former Googlers and whatever. But how much does that really add? You see, what I usually find is that hiring those kinds of people can make a lot of sense when what you're trying to do is stabilize, right? Because they're bringing some big company experience and some brand credibility to allow you to move upmarket, and there can be a lot of value to that. But if that's not where you are yet, if you're more in that seed stage where you're trying to grow, you're still working on that product-market fit, or you have product-market fit but you're trying to figure out how to do it differently than the rest of the market, you should also try hiring differently than the rest of the market. Who do you know? Where do you have advantage in being able to spot talent? That is going to be where you have a significant source of competitive advantage.
