“The team you build is the company you build, not the business plan you make. At Sun, the culture came from the founders and the first people we brought on, so I always tell founders to hire people so talented they make you slightly uncomfortable. A few mediocre early hires will define your culture before you realize it.”
“Your first hires are the DNA of the company. I look for people who have owned something from zero to one, who are comfortable with ambiguity, and who I would trust with the keys.”
“I look for people who are irrationally obsessed with the problem we’re solving, because rational talent will stay somewhere comfortable and collect a bigger paycheck. My first hires at Atlas were almost all ex-founders who had already taken a swing at health and still felt the work was unfinished, so I gave them founder-level autonomy and equity to keep thinking that way.”
“I look in the mirror first.”
“I almost try to convince early hires not to join. I lay out the hard, the underpaid, the uncertain, and if they still want in, they're the ones. The best early people on my teams rarely had perfect resumes; they said yes, then figured it out.”
“The first hires set the culture more than any later ones, so I look for people who are comfortable with no job description and genuinely enjoy wearing multiple hats. Paul Coletta at Vero told me he asks every candidate why this company? because pedigree means nothing if the mission doesn't move them.”
“I made this mistake myself: at one of my companies I hired someone I knew because they were available and I was busy, and it cost us months. The first few people set the culture you will live in, so spend real time with them in different rooms, at different times, and only hire them if you genuinely cannot picture building the company without them.”
“I learned this the hard way: the brilliant hire who creates tension in every meeting costs more than a junior rep who lifts the room. At Valley, my first few seats went to people I wanted in the foxhole when everything was on fire, because skills can be taught but personality is permanent.”
“I’d hire the person who can own something end-to-end before I’d hire the person with the shiniest resume. At Rosie our first few teammates were people who could live inside ambiguity for months, because the problem we were solving kept shifting.”