Business: Hiring and Team Building
You are what you hire. Every person is a Lego block in the company you are building — additive or dilutive. There is no sideline version of this sport.
Hiring is the number-one practical challenge startups report: not only finding the right people, but making sure those hires stick. A “great” resume that leaves in six months was never the right fit — and the cost of that mistake compounds fast when you are five people and just lost 20% of the company.
Source note: This article synthesises ideas from Michael Skok’s Startup Secrets workshop on Hiring and Team Building (Harvard Innovation Labs / Startup Secrets series), with guest practitioners Russ (HR leader; Lotus → Phase Forward → iRobot) and Eric (Acquia, at the time one of the fastest-growing software startups). It is a practitioner summary, not a transcript. Support the original session and workbook if the topic matters to you.
This session follows Vision, Mission and Culture. Culture is the filter for who you want around you. Tonight’s focus is the practical craft of hiring so that culture is reinforced rather than diluted.
Why bother: the real problem is fit, not scarcity
Founders often say they “cannot find quality talent.” In places like Boston (and most tech hubs), quality talent exists. The hard problem is fit — experience lined up to the role, passion lined up to the mission, and behaviour lined up to the culture.
Human capital is the capital that actually builds the company. Fundraising matters; without people who can take the product to market, serve customers, and hold relationships through version one, two and three, you have nothing.
A’s hire A’s; B’s hire C’s
An old rule that still kills companies:
| Hire | What happens next |
|---|---|
| A players | Hire other A-quality people; raise the bar |
| B players | Hire C’s — people who will not challenge them |
| C players | Cost you the company |
When you are desperately understaffed, the temptation is: fill the seat with a B for now. That is the slippery slope. One compromise becomes a culture of compromises.
A does not mean A-student from MIT or a laundry list of languages on a resume. It means people who will be successful here, love the work, and reinforce how you operate.
Wrong hires are expensive (and sometimes fatal)
When great people leave, you lose knowledge, networks, customer relationships, and a piece of the company’s fabric. At five people, one departure is catastrophic. At scale, even small attrition has been measured as enormous enterprise cost (MIT Sloan Review and others). Wrong founders can be fatal. Treat early seats with that seriousness.
Hiring is both art (practice interviewing) and science (clear criteria, proof, references, QC). Skip either and you guess.
Three questions every hire must answer
If you only remember three screens:
- Can they be successful at the job? — Skillset and role fit so they can win, not fail by design.
- Will they really love this job? — Internal energy that survives hard times; incentives alone do not create it.
- Will they fit and reinforce the culture? — Same ethics, values, and “how we do business,” not only what we ship.
Companies that are consistently best places to work tend to outperform comparables over a decade (Skok cites ~300% in the workshop). Culture is not soft; it is an economic fact. Hire people who strengthen it.
EKS, IQ, EQ, CQ: what you are actually assessing
EKS — Experience, Knowledge, Skills
Do not collapse these three:
| Piece | What it is | Trap |
|---|---|---|
| Skills | Methods you can apply (e.g. can program in C) | A laundry list of languages ≠ a good programmer |
| Experience | Where and how those skills were applied (web-scale backend vs mobile app) | “Brilliant coder” for the wrong class of system |
| Knowledge | Domain depth (e.g. FDA / clinical-trial regs in healthcare IT) | Skills + experience without domain can still fail |
Phase Forward example (Russ): digitising clinical trials from paper to cloud. They could find programming skill and relevant engineering experience; domain (FDA, privacy across borders) was the scarce piece. You rarely get all three perfect. Decide which gaps you can train for — and which you cannot.
IQ — smarts, carefully defined
Nobody wants to hire people who cannot think. But IQ alone does not build great teams. Pure high-IQ hires who need to be the smartest person in the room often refuse to team. Skok’s blunt lesson: he has had to fire some of the smartest people for that reason.
Ask questions that connect intellect to this job — not abstract puzzles for their own sake.
Favourite IQ / EKS opener: What is the most relevant experience, knowledge and skills you bring to this job?
If they have not listened to what the job is, they stall. If they get it, they map their past to your need quickly. That mapping is the signal.
Another draw: Favourite example of a problem you solved — and how?
What they call a “problem” reveals IQ and EQ: a bug to fix, or a dysfunctional team that had to be rebuilt? Hire for the level of problem you need solved.
Will they love the job? — passion as fuel
This is the piece founders under-interview for — and it can matter more than EKS.
Passion and persistence often overcome incomplete EKS if you set people up to apply what they have. The reverse fails often: brightest person, zero interest in your problem or domain → they peter out.
Questions that open the tank:
- What gets you out of bed in the morning?
- What do you love doing? What does a perfect day look like?
- At 9–10pm, when the day is done, what are you doing on your computer? (Acquia engineering: side projects, learning PHP/Python — not only past job titles)
- If this were your last day at work, what would you want to do?
Few people have actually answered these for themselves. Many are in a mortgage-or-debt rut. When work and life feel like the same good thing, you can feel it walking the floor — and you can feel the opposite on a site visit with “good” charts and lifeless employees. Passionate teams with fuel in the tank run past them.
Virtuous circle: love the work → pride → good results → make a difference → recognition and reward → more of the same.
Do not hire for “I want to get rich.” Hire for love of the work; rewards follow when passion aligns with company need.
Hard claim: If you cannot find what someone is passionate about and connect it to what the business is doing, you will not make great hires. One degree off becomes a mile at startup speed.
Do not sell people off their path. If the role is a deflection from what they really want, surface that early. Sustainable fit is alignment you uncover — not persuasion.
Candidate side: Do not get sold. Be authentic. If you do not know yet, say so and explore — problem-solving might mean engineering or customer service; conversation might mean sales or PR.
Thomas Edison: I never did a day’s work in my life. That is the target feeling.
EQ — why startups especially need it
Emotional quotient is not optional in most early companies. Three reasons:
- Speed teaming — Great startups constantly form and reform cross-functional teams around changing problems. Low EQ (poor self-awareness, hard to connect with) breaks that machine. Acquia’s DNA includes jump in and own it: see a problem, fix it, join the team; fail fast, learn, do not punish intelligent failure. Example: Acquia U — HR + product + customer solutions + engineering building curriculum to convert LAMP developers into Drupal talent because local hiring could not keep up.
- Customer intimacy through V1→V3 — You rarely have the right product until version three. You need feedback while you are still inflicting pain. Relationships without EQ do not survive that.
- Every stakeholder — Angels, VCs, suppliers, partners. When you need a favour under stress, relational equity matters.
Weighting: You can find many people with similar EKS and IQ. For team- and customer-dependent cultures, EQ is often the bar — not a nice-to-have weighting. Lencioni’s The Advantage: smart organisations (EKS/IQ) without healthy ones (EQ) fail; you need both. One services startup (Nervewire) listened for pronouns in interviews — we over I — as a teaming signal.
Culture still decides the flavour. A ruthless, promise-delivery culture should not hire for touchy-feely EQ — and a high-intimacy culture should not hire pure results-only sharks. Define culture first; then hire consistently with it.
CQ — culture quotient
Do they believe what you believe? Same ethics, values, principles? Do they care how you do business, not only what you ship? For early core teams this is a bar, not a slider. Noam Wasserman’s The Founder’s Dilemmas; Twitter-era leadership emphasis: personality fit over “good people” in the abstract.
QC (quality control) after every group interview: Is this person net additive to the team? If dilutive to culture or spirit — forget it. Acquia sales leaders: if any one of three key interviewers has a sneaking suspicion, they drop the candidate. Compromises they tried “anyway” never worked out.
Trust your gut. Instinct usually has a reason. Better to discover misfit up front.
Situational hiring: three people ≠ three hundred
EKS/IQ/EQ/CQ always apply; what you emphasise is situational.
| Stage | Role shape | What to stress |
|---|---|---|
| ~3 people | Swiss Army knife / “Swiss Army kitchen sink” | Flexibility, adaptability, generalism |
| ~300 people | Specialists | Deep judgment in a discipline (e.g. major-account judgment over raw IQ) |
Also situational to your company: how you sell, what customers expect, whether support must go above and beyond because the knowledge base does not exist yet. Fit is not “hire a programmer” in the abstract — it is fit for this hole in this organisation.
A+ players: three A’s and three pluses
You will rarely get perfect EKS. Hire for the package that still wins.
The three A’s
| A | Meaning | Why it matters in a startup |
|---|---|---|
| Attitude | Will, ownership, can-do | You can train skill; you cannot install will. “Hire for will, train for skill.” |
| Aptitude | Learn fast in unknown terrain | Innovation has no textbook; you need people who switch gears on the far side of the breakthrough |
| Ability | Suitability for this job | The fit package — without attitude and aptitude, ability alone stalls |
Attitude stories from the room: Zipcar/Avis fleet merge — hired an Avis shuttler with two months’ tenure who “spoke both languages,” crushed a brutal same-day fleet-balance operation; attitude jumped out; hiring manager fought HR and COO. iRobot acquisition — vision scientists said you cannot cut the “office manager” hired out of rehab: no credentials, everything-can-do attitude, ran overnight tests, fed the team, unblocked PhDs who argued with each other. Jump-in-and-do-it DNA.
Attitude signals: fail fast / learn faster; boldness over marginal improvement; persistence after you screw up; dig to root cause (not only the bug — the team process, the hiring pattern, the incentives, the culture). Participate so everyone succeeds; rise with the tide.
The three pluses
- Self-aware — Without awareness within, no EQ without. Know strengths and weaknesses so the team can assemble around them (Skok always hires strong ops/CFO first — not his strength). Build a safe culture where admitting “I’m crap at X” is allowed; otherwise you cannot fit people together.
- Authentic — Stop performing a persona. You are who you are; find where that fits.
- Athlete — When the perfect EKS does not exist, hire people who have succeeded wherever they have been and can move one degree left or right. Proven adapters beat phantom “exact matches.”
The golden triangle
Right aptitude + ability + attitude, checked against EKS / IQ / EQ / CQ, plus self-awareness, authenticity and athletic adaptability → people who can succeed at the job, love it, and reinforce culture. Not every hire hits every cell; the tools exist so you stop guessing.
Tools: how to actually uncover this
EKS — get behind the resume
Resume and LinkedIn give the surface. Do not make them recite it. Ask what enabled that experience and how it sets them up for your next chapter.
IQ — demand proof (you are small enough)
Code tests, realistic problems, open-source trails (e.g. tools that score public contributions). At Acquia: creative odd problems, realistic Drupal fixes — judge process and reasoning, not only whether the code was perfect. Practical proof beats guessing until you are very large — and even then, departments can still do it.
CQ — observe the process
Gut check plus interaction quality:
- On time is table stakes; do they thank you, follow up, ask real questions?
- Does the interview feel like a natural conversation or a torture session?
- Best hires sometimes take over the conversation so completely you forget you are interviewing — that is data.
Still ask explicit culture/values questions. Soft observation is a supplement, not a substitute.
Real references — non-negotiable
References the candidate hands you are rehearsed. Real references are ones you find: peers, people who worked for them, people they worked for.
Play Columbo: intonation matters (“Yeah, I’d hire them again” vs “in a heartbeat — here’s why”). Ask for examples. Specificity over adjectives.
Hiring manager should do the references (HR can assist). Eric’s question: What skill are you missing now that this person is gone? No answer → how valuable were they?
If you give references: truth serves everyone. A wrong-fit placement helps nobody.
Interview format
Role- and culture-dependent: serial 1:1s with team debrief (“additive or dilutive?”); or team panel for integrated roles (e.g. robotics hardware + software). Start and end as a team even when interviews are serial. Open, team-based cultures often put candidates in front of the team after a manager screen.
Brand note (Russ / iRobot): Every candidate is an extension of the brand — including people you reject. A lousy interview experience shows up next to your product on a retail shelf. Architect rejection with dignity. Consumer companies can also treat product interest as a hiring funnel.
Acquia DNA (worked example)
Culture made interviewable:
| DNA element | Idea |
|---|---|
| Committed to awesome | Standard of craft |
| Do the right thing | Ethics under pressure |
| Jump in and own it | Speed teaming / ownership |
| Give back more | Contribution beyond the ticket |
| Inspire a little crazy | Play and energy (e.g. Lunchbeat — dance at lunch, no alcohol) |
PLII: Passion, Integrity, Intelligence, Initiative — passion first, and it is mutual. You must exude passion for the company as hard as you evaluate theirs. Candidates select you too.
Workshop lessons: what good questions surface
In the room, almost every strong exchange was about EQ and CQ, not IQ — which is the point. IQ is the easier screen.
Patterns that worked:
| Question | What it tends to reveal |
|---|---|
| What are you passionate about? | Core motivation; north star; sometimes honest “I don’t know yet” + self-awareness |
| What legacy do you hope to leave? | Values, humility, how they think about team and impact |
| What does balance mean to you? | Cultural resonance; work–life model |
| What do you love about your life? | Passion + values; listen for nuances (“for now”) |
| What do you not do day to day? | Sustainable energy vs interview-hero mode |
Interviewer craft:
- Know why you are asking each question; do not run a blind list of ten.
- Ask questions people cannot fully rehearse; revelation happens in unprepared moments.
- If answers stay polished and impersonal, help them get personal — “Tell me about a time…” — or change the scene (walk, coffee, reschedule). Your job is to authenticate the person under the audition veneer.
- A good interview sells the company better than a pitch deck. Candidates remember how you made them feel for years.
Needs vs wants vs loves: “I really want this job” can mean pay, recognition, learning, green-card pressure, or true love of the work. Separate them. Mutual fit means their needs, wants and loves line up with what you can honestly offer.
Closing principles
- Mutual fit — You meet your needs; they meet theirs; they can love the work. If you only sell one side, it undoes — especially on small core teams that are the company.
- Be patient — Hire the right person, not the person right now. Urgency is permanent; a wrong fill is longer.
- Additive or nothing — Group QC; one dissenting gut is enough to stop.
- Frameworks, not dogma — EKS/IQ/EQ/CQ, three A’s, three pluses, golden triangle, real references — tools to think with, not a checklist to weaponise.
Everyone on the early team is an extension of the founder’s mission and relational equity. Hire as if the brand, the culture, and the next decade depend on it — because they do.
Practical checklist (use this week)
- Write the role’s must-have E vs K vs S — and which gap you will accept.
- Define the EQ/CQ bar for your culture in one sentence (e.g. “jump in and own it” or “market is always right”).
- Draft three passion / last-day / 10pm questions; practice them on a peer.
- Add one situational question for early-stage flexibility or late-stage judgment.
- Design one proof task (code, write, sell, support scenario) that mirrors real work.
- List who will interview; agree “any one no = no” if that matches your culture.
- Plan real references (peers + reports + managers you find); hiring manager owns the calls.
- End every debrief with: additive or dilutive?
- Audit your interview experience as brand: would a rejected candidate still buy from you?
- When desperate to fill a seat — pause and re-read the A’s-hire-A’s table.
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