Umarbek

The role of a great leader is to hire great people and empower them to do their job. I'm not saying I disagree with that statement, but that statement, if you do that and you're not careful, your company will be destroyed.

You can kind of be born a good founder. You don't need experience to be a good founder. But I'm not sure any of us are born good CEOs, and all the best CEOs are horrible when they start.

General managers are like little Russian Babushka dolls. They want to create miniature general managers and miniature, miniature general managers.

Your core asset was you built the product. Every CEO, I think, only a few exceptions should be the chief product officer of their company because isn't the most important thing of a company to make a product? Shouldn't the person who knows the most about the product be the CEO? And yet you are told to be separate from your product.

A manager that doesn't know how to do the job they're managing is like a cavalry general who can't run or ride a horse.

We said we'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.

The reason there are too many meetings in a company isn't because they don't have meeting Wednesdays; it's because they have too many people. People create meetings, and the best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people.

A players hire A players, B players hire C players. I would like to 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.

A person less capable than 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 and all this administrative tax.

You don't manage people; you manage people through the work.

Most heads of design at most tech companies don't actually manage design; they manage the people. How can you manage the people separate from the design?

Founder mode at its core is about the single principle to be in the details. Great leadership is presence, not absence.

It is not good for you to hire great people and trust them to do their job. You know that they're doing a good job if you're not in the details.

There was this paradox of CEO involvement: the more involved I got in a project, the less dysfunctional it got. The more dysfunctional it got, the more people assumed the dysfunction came from leadership. Then it was like a reverse intervention. I had to get even less involved, and then it would get so screwed up that then I would get involved. But now I'm involved in a totally dysfunctional project, so I'm now associated with dysfunction.

I review every single thing in the company. If I don't review it, it doesn't ship.

We don't ship software like other people. We develop software like people develop hardware.

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.

If you want people to 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 of check-ins.

Probably the number one reason executive hiring fails is because you hire somebody at the wrong stage, and they were managing instead of building, and you didn't know that.

Start with the results and work backwards to the people. Most people start with the resumés; they start with the brands.

The number of marketers that said they came up with "Just do it." The best way to find out who actually did it was to ask the people back then who actually did it.

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 follow-up actually becomes absent of details.

The executives have more experience bullshitting you than you have detecting their lies. So it's like an asymmetric game where you're a white belt fighting a black belt, and they're going to just punch you in the face repeatedly.

You should probably spend as much time referencing as you do hiring.

I think hiring is too much like a sales pipeline, and hiring should be more like a network building than a sales pipeline.

I interviewed the first 400 people, and I wish I had interviewed longer. Maybe my biggest regret is not interviewing the first thousand. You should interview every candidate until the recruiting team stages an intervention. Once they stage an intervention, you should interview for two more years after that until everyone threatens to resign.

I often tell my directors I don't want somebody that you could hire without me. If they would come to work for you, they're not good enough. They're only good enough if they come to work for me.

If your team can bring in people without your help, they're not reaching high enough.

B players say other B players are awesome, so you have to qualify the references.

Ask them who the best people they ever worked with are. See if they say the person's name you just asked about. They usually tell the truth, and if they don't say that person's name, they're not one of the best.

The head of design should never ever report to the head of product. The head of design should report to the CEO of the company. If the company had a technology-appointed CEO, you're not a tech company, and that would be crazy.

A pitcher never takes themselves off the mound. People are not going to come to you telling you they can't do their job. Also, they're not going to take any hints.

Everyone always says I waited too long to fire someone. But I never did it too fast. Why is that? It's crazy that everyone says that over and over again.

If people aren't scaling, they're doing things today they should have done six months ago. If people are kind of scaling, they're doing things today they should be doing. And if they're really scaling, they're doing things they don't even need to be doing for six months. They're seeing around corners.

People never hire people better than themselves. So there might be people that are good at their job, but it's not enough to be good at your job. If you are the best in the world at your job but you can't hire really great people, then you're not going to be the best.

Every potential hire is guilty until proven innocent. It is the opposite of our justice system. The proof is that they don't work for you. So you need evidence to hire them, not evidence to eliminate them as a candidate.

Almost every company hires mediocre people, that absence of weaknesses, not people who have proof of being really good and spiky in a few areas.

The high performers actually have the most respect because high performance and respect in an organization actually go hand in hand.

Old companies and big old companies that haven't grown have people who are typically very comfortable in politics and bureaucracy, and those are the wrong skills for a startup.

My job is to see potential in you that you don't see in yourself. 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 that you don't see in yourself.

At the very end of the process, try to talk them out of the job. If you try to sell somebody, they're naturally 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.

Recruiters want to sell their company often as a country club. It creates managed expectations when they come in.

Why do the most fit people in the world want to be Navy Seals? Because they want the challenge. The average person doesn't want a challenge, but the best people want challenge, and so that will turn off mediocre people but will turn on great people.

Just because you have a front-row seat at a bunch of companies doesn't mean you now know how to run a company or advise other people to run a company. 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 capitalists.

I would be very wary of junior partners joining your board because they tend to be the most risk-averse and will be least likely to have your back when times go bad. The senior partners will just say, "Get rid of them," and they're not going to have the moral authority to stand up for them.

Board members can't make companies, but they can destroy companies.

If you take advice from a VC and it doesn't work, you're still responsible. The only thing that matters is you're successful, not if you listened to them or not.