a manager that doesn't know how to do the job they're managing is like a Cavalry General who can't run a ride a horse

Steve Jobs said that like he didn't use these words but he thought of the team as a special forces we said were're the Navy Seals not the Navy we want a small lean Elite highly skilled team not a team of kind of mid-level Battalion type people and
09:24
the reason why is every person brings at them a communication tax the reason there's to many meetings in a company isn't because they don't have meeting no meeting Wednesdays it's because they have too many people

you know the old saying a players hire a players b players hire C players I would like to
09:49
amend it B players hire lots of C players not just a few but a lot because those are the kind of people that like building Empires but they're also the people if you can't capably do your job you don't hire people better than you and a person less capable to you can't do the job so you need like three incapable people because one incapable person can't actually do all the work but now three incapable people are just going in three different directions creating all these meetings

the health of an organization I think is the relation between engineering and marketing or an Enterprise relationship with engineering and sales the people making the product the people selling the product in most companies it's like restaurants and the waiter is yelled at if they go in the kitchen by the chefs and that is very dysfunctional

great leadership is presence not absence so to go back to my lesson it is not good for you to hire great people and trust them to do their job how do you know that they're doing a good job if you're not in the details

I'll use a golf analogy not that I play golf but I've taken a couple lessons once and the instructor and I suck at it but the instructor like they watch your golf swing and over time the
12:12
ideas you built muscle memory and the golf instructors need to be there all day and that's what it should be like at a company

Steve Jobs Elon mus does this uh Jensen Wong does this Walt Disney does this all them do this if the CEO is the chief product officer in the company then CE should review all of the work so I review every single thing in the company if I don't review it it doesn't ship I review everything on a
14:41
Cadence the Cadence is every week every two weeks every four weeks every eight weeks every 12 weeks some like customer service I might review quarterly

Steve Jobs had a concept he called stacking the bricks he said if you have a pile of bricks and you lay them on the ground no one will notice the ground but if you stack them vertically you create a tower and everyone notices the tower and that was the theory behind launches it was a coordination mechanism and it was a marketing moment for the company to ship products

if you want people to work harder I don't don't think you need to tell them to be in the office I don't think you need to check their badges I don't think you need them to come in nights or weekends you can do that if you want people work hard have a launch deadline make the thing crazy ambitious and check every week that is the way to make people work harder and you work as hard as the goal is ambitious in the frequency or check-ins

I have only a couple tips on interviewing my first tip is you ask follow-up questions you ask them how
19:24
to explain how they did something and the key is to ask two follow-ups you never want to get the first answer you always want the third answer and if people don't know what they're talking about they struggle they might be able to follow up but the second fall they actually become absent of details

do you believe the CEO should interview every candidate I interviewed the first 400 people and I wish I interviewed longer maybe my biggest regret is not interviewing the first thousand I think you should interview every candidate until the recruiting team stages intervention once they stage intervention you should interview for two more years

let's say you were hiring Finance how do you develop taste in who to hire that's a such a good question my first answer is assume you cannot assess their um technical competency in areas that you are not more competent than they are at and that will be almost every function so how do you know a lawyer is a good lawyer how do you know a finance person is a good Finance person I think there are ways to know if people are generally smart and intelligent um for senior people start with the results and work backwards the
28:14
people for junior people look at energy passion and like intelligence SL learning agility right anyone that's got a lot of energy is really passionate is courageous Fearless bold um their hands on and they have a lot of learning agility it's going to grow really really quickly as senior people I don't know if it really matters because by then they should have results every potential hire is guilty until proven innocent

I have so many different tips and tricks one counter two of tip is at the very end of the process try to talk him out of the job that actually solves two problems I mean not I'm not saying playing mind games but like if you try to sell somebody they're naturally
35:46
skeptical and they think they're being sold to and they're going to take the counter position the counter position is not doing it have you ever been on a date with somebody and they're like trying too hard to pursue you and it kind of like turns you off a a little bit or maybe you've been on the other side of that and you were a little too eager and like so you got to be careful the other thing is people trust you more when at the end of the process say here's all the reasons you shouldn't
36:09
work here and I'll say and usually I'll say here are all the reasons you work here it's going to be the longest hours You' ever had I'm going to hold you to higher standards it's going to be day and night it's going to be this it's going to be that now if it is that way see recruiters want to sell their company often as a country club we have great benefits we have great this we that and it creates this manage expectations wh

like there was an old um there was an old job ad by Ernest Shackleton are you aware this job ad let me if I can find it um Ernest Ernest Shackleton sorry my eyes aren't great without glasses Ernest Shackleton was an expeditionary like a hundred years ago um and his and he he had this giant shipwreck and he famously um all the guys like survived and there's a very famous job posting and here's the job posting it says men wanted for hazardous Mission uh sorry men wanted for
37:05
hazardous Journey small wages bitter cold long months of complete darkness constant danger safe return doubtful honor and recognition in case of success

don't sell a Rosy picture of the experience of working in the really good people like why do like the most fit people in the world want to be Navy Seals because they want the challenge

when Mark andreon was one of my First Investors he was competing for a deal he won the deal over someone else because he just called me more and it worked he would call me he would text me he would visit me he'd check in with me and he just wanted it more and I think FaceTime makes a difference so that's number two number three have people they trust call them Mark andreon had me do a
38:10
zoom with I think like pidar who was a founder of eBay back when like that was a big deal because we called ourselves the EB space and I'm like oh my God pure midar and then I think he had Mark Zuckerberg called me and I was like oh my God I I like this is crazy

sell the dream tell them like what it's going to be like there but talk them out of the job
38:39
at the end um try to um you know have people that you trust sell them on the job

I just say is like tell them like the kind of vision you have for them I like to tell people like my job is to see potential in you that you don't see in yourself and I'm going to tell you something's not good enough all the time but when I say that I'm not saying you're not good enough what I'm telling you is I see potential in you you don't see in yourself and people like that

have courtside seats and I don't indulge in a lot of things by indulge in courtside seats so I have what you might call a front row seat for all the Warriors championship games but just because I had a front row seat at championships doesn't mean I can coach an NBA team and that's true of venture capitalist just because you at a front row see it at a bunch of companies doesn't mean you now know how to run a company or advise other people to run a company