Hiring is hard. Not hiring can seem even harder, but often isn't.

At my last company we went from entrance to exit without hiring one employee. I'm now three years into DuckDuckGo, and still haven't hired.

Needless to say, I'm an outlier. So don't take what I say about hiring too seriously, but perhaps I have something useful to say on not hiring.

Most angel pitches I get seem to suggest the use of funds will go to salary, both to the founders and to immediate new hires. The assumption is of course that these new hires will move the company forward, faster.

Yet every time I see that pitch, I look at my own experience and question this assumption. I'd much rather see initial use of funds around figuring out distribution, i.e. testing out different traction verticals. And then once one or more customer acquisition channels are flowing, then hire.

So why do people want to hire so early?

We need to build x, y and z, ASAP. Before you've figured out distribution? What evidence do you have that x, y and z, once built, will make customer acquisition any easier?

Beta customers saying they want things isn't enough. There isn't a good reason to add x, y and z to your product, i.e. complexity, unless you really know it will propel you faster to new customers. Yes, you can never really know, but I see a lot of people who certainly don't know. 

I understand their position, however. They like engineering; they like working on hard problems; they like the idea of running a team. That's great, but it doesn't make it the right business decision.

We need a real designer because we suck at design. Have you really tried yet? Really? Usually not.

I'm not the world's best designer by any means, nor am I "classically trained" in design as they say, but I like my results, and I bring in the big guns when needed as freelancers. I'm sure you can do the same for at least your initial versions.

It just takes time and effort. Yes, that is time and effort you may not want to spend, but do you need to hire a full-time position because you're insecure/lazy/etc.? No.

Instead, lean on the powers of incremental improvement and the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Spend time each week looking at a specific parts of your design, and iterate on them. It will get better if you put in the time. And then for finishing touches, e.g. nicer images (the last 20%), outsource via 99designs/freelancers/etc.

A corollary to this one is user experience (UX), i.e. interaction design. I agree this is super important. I also still think the founders should be doing it. Again, iterate, based on real feedback from users, and then bring in consultants and tools to give you ideas and polish.

We have too much to do. Any startup can easily grow to fill 100% of your time. That doesn't mean you're spending your time on the right things, or that hiring someone new and filling 100% of their time will increase outcome potential for your startup.

In addition, there are three main problems with hiring.

The wrong person can negatively impact your startup. There are horror stories, but more run of the mill is they're just mediocre or don't have a true startup mentality. Their presence can turn your company more mediocre, and that is not good.

People also tend to underestimate the time it will require post-hiring and post-ramp-up to manage your hire(s). You've just added lots of meetings and other communication channels. Hiring takes a lot of time, both before and after. Your employee will not be inside your head.

And finally, hiring takes money. It increases your burn rate significantly. Companies before product/market fit, i.e. traction, need to stay around long enough until they get it. That can take a lot of time, like years. There are countless cases where companies folded only to miss their moment and see other companies rise up where they might have done so.

One approach I like that some of my portfolio companies are taking is to tie hiring decision points to traction milestones, e.g. once we hit $xK/month in revenue we'll do our next hire. 

The nice things about this approach are that it allows you to a) manage the burn rate issue and b) take a long time to plan your hire. The latter allows you to make sure you're getting the right person in the right position and that they will have a positive impact on the startup. 

Early on it is not entirely clear what that right position will turn out to be. You have a lot of short term needs, but that doesn't mean they should turn into full time positions.

* Photo is courtesy of The American.

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Great read

I’m editing the manuscript for Public Parts now and so I’ll be throwing out some thoughts from the book to get your thoughts in return. Here, from my introduction, are what I see as the four stages in our conception of “public”:

1. From ancient times to the Renaissance, “public” was synonymous with the state and the state was synonymous not with its people (that’s our modern notion) but with its rulers. Leaders were not merely public figures; they embodied the public. The people had little political standing. They had little independent identity. “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category,” writes historian Jacob Burkhardt in Civilization of the Renaissance (via Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change).

2. In the so-called early modern period of the 16th and 17th centuries (also known as the Renaissance), Gutenberg’s printing press as well as the theater, music, art, maps, and markets enabled some people to create their own publics, as the Making Publics project at McGill University argues (I’ll explore their ideas further in a later chapter). These were voluntary publics formed among strangers sharing similar interests—which could mean simply that they read the same book and then contemplated and discussed the same ideas. Now it was possible for private individuals to take on and share a public identity independent of the state.

3. In the 18th century, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argues, the public sphere—and public opinion—first appeared as a political force and a counterweight to the state. Finally, the public began to mean the people. Habermas believes that a brief, golden age of rational, critical debate in society, carried out in the coffee houses of England and salons of Europe, was soon corrupted by mass media. I’ll argue differently, suggesting that the real corruption of the ideal of the public was to throw us all into a single public sphere, a mass—the lumpenpublic. To this day, the assumption that we are one public—which is the basis of mass production, mass distribution, mass marketing, and mass media—has enabled government, companies, and media to avoid dealing with us as distinct individuals and groups and instead to see us as faceless poll numbers and anonymous demographics.

4. Today, with the internet, we are just beginning to create a new notion of what public and the public mean. Like our early-modern ancestors, we—but all of us now—have the tools (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…) to create and join publics, establishing our own identities and societies. I see that as a purer form of the public, built not around the interests of the powerful but instead around our own interests, desires, and needs. Rather than being forced into a public not of our own making, we now define ourselves and our publics. The new vision of the public may look chaotic, but then change always does. The critical difference today—the next step in the evolution of the idea—is that a public is no longer a one-way entity, flowing from the powerful—king, politician, publisher, or performer—to an audience. Now through our conversation and collaboration, ignoring old boundaries, we define our publics.

In this progression, we are continuing—but accelerating—a timeless dance of balancing the individual and society: our rights, privileges, powers, responsibilities, concerns, and prospects; our privacy and publicness. That describes nothing so much as the process of modernization. In ancient times, Richard Sennett says in The Fall of Public Man, “public experience was connected to the formation of social order”—that is, the end of anarchy; while in recent centuries publicness “came to be connected with the formation of personality”—that is, individuality and freedom. Ancient and authoritarian regimes told people what they must think and do; modern societies enable and ennoble citizens to do what they want to do, together.

So today are atomizing because we have the freedom to be independent. Then we can reform into new molecules because we are social; we need each other and can accomplish more together than apart. We find the publics we wish to join based not merely on gross labels, generalizations, and borders drawn about us—red v. blue, black v. white, nation v. nation—but instead on our ideas, interests, and needs: cancer survivors, libertarians, Deadheads, vegetarians, single moms, geeks, even privacy advocates. We finally tear down the elite of the public few and each become public people in our own right. . . .

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 3:30 pm and was tagged habermas, history, makingpublics, public, publicness, snippet.