Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

One Simple Rule to Work By to Be a Successful CEO | Twitter's Jeff Seibert

8 Apr 2015 · 1 min

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Jeff Seibert, former Twitter CEO, says a CEO's job is to become irrelevant by hiring people to replace every function they do. He spent all his time coding until he hired engineers, then realized he was recruiting constantly, so he brought on a full-time recruiter as his eighth employee. That single hire let the company triple its staff in five months.

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So as the CEO, I believe very strongly that your sole job is to make yourself irrelevant. So whatever you are spending your time on, you should hire for. And so I had to spend 100% of my time coding, because Wayne was more on the marketing side, which was critical for us. And so we first started hiring engineers. And then we did that, we built a team of 6 engineers. I spent— I was spending all my time recruiting, so we hired a full-time recruiter as our number 8 employee. And I think that is one of the biggest decisions that made the company successful is because we then tripled the team in the next 5 months. Because she was now full-time on recruiting, and even though I had spent most of my time on recruiting, you can never really go full-time on recruiting as the CEO, and so we just weren't doing as great of a job at it as we could. I guess the one area then, sure, I spent probably 2 months fundraising. It's hard to replace yourself there. But then we, I had to spend most of my time doing Engineering management, so we hired a director of engineering. I spend most of my time doing product strategy, so we hired some PMs. It's sort of a perpetual cycle. Like, whatever you get shifted into, you hire and replace.