- He wants founders who are thoughtful, but then make forceful decisions.
- Founders must be able to code, but he doesn’t have strong opinions about languages.
- Don’t raise more money until you’re sure you have product market fit.
- “most of the time entrepreneurs are realistic near the end and say this isn’t working. Those decisions aren’t that difficult. It gets more difficult in later stages when you’ve got millions of dollars in.”
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.”
“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.”
Even though I hate behavioral interview questions and think they’re abused, I think there are some gems in this list that could be useful to interviewers if used properly.
A good outline for how to structure your interview questions. When you know this is the information you’re trying to learn, it’s easier to know what to ask to learn it.
