“I don't screen for ego. I screen for whether they can ship, take feedback, and put the mission above themselves.”

“I don't screen for ego; I screen for whether someone can own a whole function and make calls I wouldn't have made. The people who need credit usually reveal themselves in the first 30 days, and at our stage we move fast enough that one missed ship is all the signal you need.”

“I made this mistake myself in 2009, letting ego keep me chasing a startup for a year instead of taking a good acquisition offer. Now I look for people who have been humbled by a smaller company after a big one, because humility is a muscle you usually build the hard way.”

“I frame hiring around fit with the scrappy mentality early on. Someone from a big tech company hasn't learned how to say yes and figure it out later—they're trained to hand things off, to wait for resources that'll never come. That person will leak frustration onto your team.”

“I hire for integrity before intelligence before energy, and I make our culture aggressively opt-in: Olympian work ethic, no sugarcoating. The people who flinch at that filter themselves out.”

“You're asking the wrong question. The problem isn't screening them out in the hiring process—it's that high-ego people won't self-select into an early startup in the first place.”

“High-ego founders often have personal goals that don't align with the company's. I've learned the hard way that you don't need them at all at first—wait until you've hit a revenue milestone and can afford their bandwidth. Hire ops and tech leaders first, only hand out CXO titles after values align, and the moment you spot a mismatch between what they want and what you're building, don't wait for growth to fix it.”

“I see what you're really asking, and it's different from keeping people out. It's about recognizing early who won't work—because you can't screen ego perfectly in an interview. What you can do is spot it faster.”

“The real filter is whether someone's willing to do the unglamorous work. When you're laying out the role, be blunt about how messy it is: low structure, constant pivots, shipping under pressure. If someone lights up hearing that instead of getting nervous, you've found the right type. High-ego people opt themselves out.”