1. Adaptability
“ask where they want to be in five years. While most job recruiters look for candidates who know exactly where they want to be, we’re the opposite.”
2. Honesty
“we ask them if they’re nervous. If we ask someone whether they’re nervous and they say no, but they’re sweating, shaking, and breaking out in rashes, it’s pretty much a red flag they’re not being genuine.”
3. Confidence
“Say, for example, a candidate says they think the start-up down the street is building something awesome. Then I say, “that start-up is the worst idea since pink Vitamin Water. And that stuff tastes like Robitussin.”“
4. Enthusiasm
“Making sure that they’re not more enthusiastic about the idea of working at your company (free food, crazy team outings) than the reality of the job (disruptive ideas, talented co-workers) is super important.”
“And Mr. Cho kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, ‘Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.’”
“I was part of a number of failed remote R&D attempts. The one time it worked was when we decided to abandon meetings, project documents, tracking tools, etc. Instead, we got a high quality speakerphone so everyone could overhear everyone else’s conversations, and we left it on all day, every day. It wasn’t the same as being together in person, but we did manage to get some of the human friction back.” -Chris Dixon
“The first thing you do is you figure out how valuable your company is (we call this “best value”). This is NOT your 409a valuation (we call that “fair value”)…
The second thing you do is break up your org chart into brackets. There is no bracket for the CEO and COO…
When you have the brackets set up, you put a multiplier next to them. There are no hard and fast rules on multipliers. You can also have many more brackets than four. I am sticking with four brackets to make this post simple. Here are our default brackets:
Senior Team: 0.5x
Director Level: 0.25x
Key Functions: 0.1x
All Others: 0.05x…
Then you multiply the employee’s base salary by the multiplier to get to a dollar value of equity. Let’s say your VP Product is making $175k per year. Then the dollar value of equity you offer them is 0.5 x $175k, which is equal to $87.5k….
Then you divide the dollar value of equity by the “best value” of your business and multiply the result by the number of fully diluted shares outstanding to get the grant amount. We said that the business was worth $25mm and there are 10mm shares outstanding. So the VP Product gets an equity grant of ((87.5k/25mm) * 10mm) which is 35k shares.”
“Here’s a rundown on the weekly calendar Dorsey keeps as CEO of payments platform Square and chairman of Twitter.
Monday: Management meetings and “running the company” work
Tuesday: Product development
Wednesday: Marketing, communications and growth
Thursday: Developers and partnerships
Friday: The company and its culture
Weekends are a bit slower: Saturdays are for hiking and Sundays are for “reflection, feedback and strategy,” Dorsey said.”
“And it’s not the easy problems that make it your way. Those already got solved. Rather, they’re the hardest problems that people bring to your attention. Day after day. That, my friends, can be tiring.”
“…it led to two pretty interesting discoveries: a) people often don’t realize they’re facing a problem. Rather, they just feel frustration. b) problem solving, and particularly the ability to shepherd a problem through the four stages listed above, is highly correlated with seniority.”
“How to Measure the Metrics that Determine Real Progress” By Trevor Owens on Oct 3, 2011
