Andy Walsh compares hiring a chief of staff to dating a CEO, focusing on personality fit and how to find the right match. The role requires someone who works well with the founder's specific style, not just general competence.
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Continuing on, I would love to talk about culture here in the sense of if you are thinking about hiring, how do you pair up and matchmake to a certain degree a good chief of staff to a CEO? Because the CEO is a very certain type of person, particularly in a startup. And I'm not gonna double-click on the stereotype of what a founding CEO is, but they're a certain type of personality. How do you start to think about that pairing? How do you go about finding that person, how they meet each other, and how do you optimize that process to make sure that you've got the best chance of both finding the right pair. Because it is, you said up at the start, it's like dating in a way. You could find someone that's good, but you need someone that's great to make that shine.