Hire people who solve problems and fit your culture, not specialists for specific roles. Google built early teams around a few core traits because technology changes fast. Narrow job descriptions become obsolete within months.
Spanish. One of the key components I think for Google's success was hiring, hiring great people and really building culture early on. And one thing as company founders or as investors in companies, I think there is no more important thing you can do in the first couple of years for your company. Of building a culture that lasts, building a culture that you set the tone for, that the early employees set the tone for, and that really helps everybody in the company to understand how everything works. And this culture evolves over time. But one of the most important parts is not to hire for jobs. If you hire people and just fill slots, you will guarantee to make mistakes in an early-stage startup. Because one thing that is the only constant technology is that there will be change. And if you hire somebody to be a UX designer and a UX designer alone, that person might actually not have a job 3 or 6 months out. In the same way that you might have some specialists around some technology or someone that is just doing one thing really well, but they actually won't be that useful for you as a startup. So hire for the company. Now, put out a list of things that people should have characteristics that you want to have in your company rather than skills. It's very easy to checkbox and say, "Oh, it has to be a specialist in Hadoop and it has to do this and it has to have a work permit in the U.S. and not cost more than $100,000." Those are very, very easy things to hire for. What's really difficult is to define what your company is and make a list of 5 or 10 things to say. At Google we said, "We want to hire people that solve problems." Right? When you start putting things like that out, you start to interview them very, very differently because all of a sudden you screen for not if they can program a database, but do they solve problems in the way that will come up? We actually had someone at Google that said, "We hire people like us, people that we like." That was a big important part that we actually became quite homogeneous. Google was quite diverse, but certainly not as diverse as Mitch would have ever wanted. But a big part of Google's hiring early on was to hire people that we liked. And oftentimes it's people that are like us that we like.
