Sniffing Out Talent

Second great articulation in the Keith Rabois regards finding hidden talent, a recurring topic on this blog. If you can find unrealized talent, you can have a winning attainable team, by looking forward and making forward-looking bets rather than chasing past success.

These are some characteristics for identifying that talent, per Keith:

• The candidate can relay incredibly complex ideas in simple terms.

• The candidate can see things you don’t see. Even within topics you’re fluent in, they’re able to convince you of new points of view or make you realize you’re missing something.

• They’re relentlessly resourceful. There should be things in their history, whether it’s on or off the résumé, which conveys that they’re able to make things happen, against all odds. If there is a wall in their way, they’ll go over it, under it or become friends with it. They just make things happen and leave you wowed. Any time you have that “Wow!” kind of feeling you need to just hire the person.

• They’re often contrarian. Peter Thiel now has a popularized way of figuring this out. He asks, “Explain something that you believe, that everybody else believes is wrong.”

From Writer To Editor

Some thoughts from Keith Rabois (and Jack Dorsey) about talent in a start-up, as interpreted by First Round, and the proper management of it.

First, as the leader, you need to be an editor, you cannot be writing all the time.  You need barrels — someone who can take the idea from conception to live.  For example, you cannot have a tech lead — just to take one functional area — who you constantly have to write the script out for.

If you think about people, there are two categories of high-quality people: there is the ammunition, and then there are the barrels.  You can add all the ammunition you want, but if you have only five barrels in your company, you can literally do only five things simultaneously.  If you add one more barrel, you can now do six things simultaneously.  If you add another one, you can do seven, and so on.  Finding those barrels that you can shoot through — someone who can take an idea from conception to live and it’s almost perfect — are incredibly difficult to find.  This kind of person can pull people with them.  They can charge up the hill.  They can motivate their team, and they can edit themselves autonomously.  Whenever you find a barrel, you should hire them instantly, regardless of whether you have money for them or whether you have a role for them.  Just close them.

In addition to trying to hire all the barrels you can, at a start-up every marginal person you hire should be relentlessly resourceful.  There are people who are just better than others at getting things done, and those are the kind of people you need in large numbers early on.

If you can build a team that’s barrel-heavy and is relentlessly resourceful, your job as the leader of a company is really to just be the editor — a concept that Jack Dorsey has now made mainstream.  Every time you do something, you should think, “Am I writing or am I editing?”  You should be able to tell the difference immediately.  It’s okay to write once in a while, but if you’re writing on a consistent basis in marketing, or in legal, or in product, or business development, or whatever the case is, there’s a fundamental problem with that team.  Get into a position where you are editing all the time.

The analogy of an editor is great, because what an editor does is not the work product.  Think about a reporter.  The reporter writes the story.  The editor may ask clarifying questions.  The editor may simplify and extract things, edit things out or leave things in, or occasionally reorganize things that require follow-up.  But, fundamentally, editing is the role.