High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

by Elad Gil

Raw charisma is drastically overrated by technical founders. Don’t be fooled just because someone is friendly and charming.

There is a fine line between self-confidence and arrogance. When I interview people for engineering roles, the smartest people write down the question and work through it. The people who think they were the smartest try to do it in their heads and get it wrong.

The right strategy is to not hire the person. “If there is a doubt, there is no doubt” unfortunately proves itself to be true over and over again.

Patrick Collison: When it comes to culture, I think the main mistakes that companies make are being too precious about it, being too apologetic about it, and not treating it as dynamic and subject to revision.

But while people are attuned to how successful a cradle for technology Silicon Valley is, they pay less attention to, and are I think less aware of, how densely populated a graveyard it is.

Yeah, actually the most successful class of people in Silicon Valley on a consistent basis are either the venture capitalists—because they get to be diversified, and at least used to control a scarce resource, although it’s currently not a scarce resource—or people who are very good at identifying companies that have just hit product/market fit. They have the background, expertise, and references that those companies really want them to help scale. And then those people go into the latest Dropbox, they go into the latest Airbnb.

Google’s purchase of Waze may have been in part defensive, to prevent Facebook or Apple from entering mapping well.

In general, on the low end, an acqui-hire means a 20% signing bonus to founders and standard salaries and packages for everyone else, with the cap table (i.e., the company’s investors) getting no money back. This is more common than people think, and many touted and tweeted acquisitions turn out in reality to be hiring a subset of a team and shutting their company and product down.