Two approaches to hiring as you grow: plan ahead like Microsoft does, or wait until you desperately need someone and hire a generalist who can wear multiple hats. Startups should do the second one.
So to get a little bit more into the weeds here, let's talk about org structuring. So as you're building out a company, on a strategic level, there's two major schools of thought here. One is to plan ahead of need. So, and the advantage of that is that you get to train people, you're not doing fire drills all the time, you're, you're basically trying to build up your company and prepare it for whatever growth is coming. The other is desperate need drives hires. Now, I don't like fire drills at all, but I actually fall into the school, and Adam does too, we've talked about this, of leaning towards desperate need drives hires. And the reason is that as a startup, you have very limited resources all the time. When you're a big company like Microsoft, okay, sure, plan ahead of need and hire people and train them up and be ready for growth. Fine. At a startup, you don't have that luxury. If you're hiring generalists and you're, you know, you're in the 10 to 25 people range, you can do desperate need driving hires as the general bias. You cannot predict very much about your company. So you get to be iterative in this mode, you get to hire generalists into this mode, and you get to move those generalists around as you learn. So I tend to sit in the second school.
