A founder shares their favorite interview tactic: getting candidates to complain about a previous job. Any complaint is a red flag. They also discuss values from their upbringing that shaped how they hire.
What is an interview question or questions that unintuitively give you a lot of signal?
My favorite one is I try to like subtly goad someone into complaining about a previous job that they've had. Basically, if I can get them to complain, then it's like instant failed the interview.
Has there been a value or a lesson from upbringing or early career that you have realized has been critical?
Upon reflection, I think taste is really important, and that's something we inadvertently got right in our early hiring and early team. Hiring people that have like some shared sense sense of taste goes a really long way. And I can actually see that you guys do have taste. Like, the office is cool. We had to churn a lot of our early customers, which was really hard, and it felt really risky at the time. The first contract workflows we ever made were for YC companies, and we coded that up a couple hours before demo day. That was kind of our first success as a business. And then we're like, okay, well, like, we should do this for all YC companies. I think the definition of a great company is a company that changes the trajectory of an idea even after the company is gone. I think that's an interesting way of about, like, what a successful company is, that even if that company ceased to exist, the idea itself is different.
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