In this video, Royston G. King explains that early‑stage startups should prioritize hiring "FSO" (Figure Shit Out) people—individuals who are adaptable, eager to learn, and comfortable tackling a wide range of operational tasks using resources like Google. He argues that specialist expertise (e.g., top‑tier email marketers or designers) is less valuable at the outset because startups face countless minute, varied challenges that require a "can‑figure‑it‑out" mindset. While specialists can be valuable later, the immediate need is for team members who can quickly acquire competence across many domains, are willing to get their hands dirty, and possess a thirst for knowledge. The speaker stresses that hiring for attitude and learning ability outweighs hiring for narrow technical skill in the earliest phases of a business.
Chapters
When you're building your startup team, and you might even want to ask yourself if you are this person as well, is FSO people. All right, this is a term that I love to use. FSO means figure shit out. All right, when you are a startup, I don't care if nobody on your team, uh, if everybody hates finance, right? I don't care if I don't care if everybody hates looking at contracts. I don't care if everybody hates just dealing with whatever the 900,000 things of minutiae that you're going to have to do to build a business. You need people on your team that have the ability to, number one, be open to learning new things, right? And then number two, have that attitude of like, yeah, I can figure that shit out, right? I can go on to Google. I'm not going to become the world's greatest expert on whatever subject this is, but I know how to use Google. And I'm like, have a thirst for knowledge and I can go figure this shit out in a couple of hours and at least do it to a level of, you know, relatively average competency. All right. That's a figure shit out person. And in a very early startup team, those are the people that you need. All right. Because the world's greatest email marketer or the world's greatest this designer, they're not going to you know, help you get over that hump in the very early stages of the business. Now, if the world's greatest email marketer or the world's greatest designer also have that thirst to learn new stuff and are willing to get their hands dirty on a lot of different topics, then that's great. But, but yeah, you don't want to hire for skill in those early stages because you will see that, that friction of, of style and what you need in that early stage and what maybe people may have in mind when they're starting to build a business.
