Leadership
The people you bring in will bring people like themselves, not like you. A-players attract A-players, B-players bring C-players, and arrogance can kill a company before it starts.
There is a bias worth knowing before you hire your first person: the people you bring into your company will bring in others like themselves, not like you, however much you wish otherwise. People have their own thinking, their own principles, and even when they are trying to serve what you want in the business, they will bring in people they filter through their own consciousness, people they believe fit your business, but through the lens of their principles, not yours.
This compounds, which is why it is so important to get right early. The first person hires the second in their own image. The second and third hire the fourth through seventh in theirs. Within a year, the culture of your company is not the culture you intended, it is the culture of whoever you let hire, iterated a few times. This is not something you can fix later with a values statement on the wall. It is set by the first handful of people and the people they attract, and it hardens fast. Which is exactly why the early hires deserve a level of care that feels almost excessive.
This is why there is an old story, almost a myth, in Silicon Valley, that a founder handles the first hundred hires directly, in the final interview, the final decision. It would be good for that to happen in at least the first few dozen hires. As much as possible, the founder or founders, the ones who most understand the path, the direction, and the plan of the business, should be directly involved in the hiring decision. Some collaborations matter less in terms of alignment, because their temporary nature demands a quick decision for something you need today and someone else might build tomorrow. As long as such a collaboration is not destructive, it is fine if it is not fully aligned with the company's operating principles, a freelancer building a temporary tool, for instance. But the core hires are different.
Steve Jobs said it, and it is true: high-performance people, A-players, will bring you other A-players. People who consider themselves high-performance, without arrogance, have an intrinsic need for other high-performers around them. And that word, arrogance, is the thing to watch. Arrogance is not welcome in a company. It is not welcome anywhere, and especially not in a startup, a company at the beginning. It should be removed as fast as possible, along with toxicity and toxic thoughts that can spread across the whole team, because they can destroy a company, a product, before it even sets off.
Let me be specific about what I mean by toxic behavior, because it is not a vague word. I mean aggressive temperaments, certain dramatizations, certain forms of emotional blackmail, which lead to arguments, conflicts, aggression, and eventually to wrong decisions that can destroy a business or destroy the culture, the wellbeing of a company, which is so important at the start given the stressful process a young company goes through. And it does not matter if that toxic behavior hides useful operating principles underneath, principles that might benefit the company. It does not matter, because it is a compromise that, once made, spreads. As the company grows in headcount, the toxicity spreads with it, and a rift forms between the original team and the new members, because, let us be honest, nobody likes toxic behavior. Probably not even the people performing it.
I want to stress the part about the useful skill underneath the toxicity, because that is the compromise founders actually get tempted by. Nobody keeps a toxic person who adds nothing. The dangerous case is the toxic person who is genuinely talented, whose skill you feel you cannot afford to lose. And the honest answer is that you cannot afford to keep them, because the skill is local and the toxicity is contagious. One person's talent helps the tasks they touch. One person's toxicity poisons the culture everyone touches. You are trading a concentrated benefit for a distributed cost, and the distributed cost always wins over time, especially in a small company where there is nowhere for the poison to dilute.
A-players will always want to work with other A-players. They will be capable, and sometimes even want, to mentor people who lack experience but have a handful of principles aligned with theirs and the potential to be high-performance, or who already are, in a way, because high performance is something that has to be grown and refined. And high performance is not the same as working hard. But high-performers cannot work with people who are lazy or who simply do not align with their principles and values. So they will bring you more A-players. B-players, said without insult, will by the nature of their principles want to bring in C-players, because of ego, the same ego the A-players have, except the B-players may have a slightly larger drive to dominate, so they bring in people beneath them. A company can have all these types, and certainly will. Sometimes it is irrelevant. But it would be ideal for the founding team or the core people, three, four, ten of them, to be high-performance, because that is how the success you want actually happens.
So what is high performance? A simple definition is the capacity to produce change in a way that is optimal for the company's progress. More simply, these people help the company grow, help more sales come in, help create an extraordinary product, and working with them feels easy, so easy that sometimes you struggle to keep up with the speed of their progress. You will recognize them because in the second before you start a conversation with them, you feel a pleasant sense that things are going to happen. You will recognize the less-performant people because in the second before you start a conversation with them, a feeling of blockage arrives, and it becomes hard, at a soul level, to start projects with them.
That feeling, in the second before the conversation, is a better signal than most people trust. We are trained to distrust our gut and rely on data, and for many decisions that is right. But for the felt sense of working with a person, the gut is picking up on hundreds of small signals your conscious mind has not tabulated yet. If you consistently feel a small dread before dealing with someone, that dread is information. It usually means the interactions produce friction and blockage rather than progress, and no amount of talent fully compensates for a person who makes everything harder to start.
I want to name a specific and dangerous type, because it hides well. There is what I would call false high performance, pseudo-high-performers. You will see them always stressed, always complaining that they work hard, always short on time, and yet with almost nothing accomplished. That does not mean they are bad people for the company, or that you must get rid of the collaboration, but it does mean you should take measures, because this can be a form of toxic behavior that reaches the others, the ones who genuinely work hard, who genuinely create and accomplish things, but do not say so, again because of their personality. The complainer sets a tone, and the tone is contagious.
Which brings me to efficiency, the thing underneath all of this. The efficiency with which a person in your company operates can take you where you want in one year, or three, or ten. Your own efficiency matters just as much. The people who complain that they work hard and that nobody sees it may be telling the whole truth, and still not be as efficient as they need to be for your business to reach success faster. It is possible for these people to create blockages through their pseudo-performance, their pseudo-efficiency. These things have to be analyzed and caught in time, because they cause both stress and a lack of progress that spreads across the team. Nobody wants complainers. Or if someone does want them, they may agree with them, and then the collaboration is not beneficial to your company.
And you have to turn this same lens on yourself. Ask honestly what the real efficiency is with which your employees, and you, perform. Do I complain that I do not have enough time? Do I complain that I have too much to do? Do I complain that nothing gets accomplished? That analysis might hand you a key, a way to focus on what actually matters, and a realization that the things you do could be done more easily and faster than you do them now. A simple tool might change how you operate. A workflow might be inefficient. A lack of information in some part of the business might be causing decisions that lead to inefficiency and then to frustration. Sometimes the person who cannot keep up is stuck on old technology because it feels comfortable, and it is not knowledge that makes the difference there but principles of operation, because principles are what determine whether someone, even unadapted to a new technology, will go and learn it.
You can force that with aggression, do this or you are fired, and yes, that can change principles too, but it is still principles that change, and I would rather use less aggression. So the better move is to figure out who is genuinely efficient in the company, and whether you, as founder, are genuinely efficient in what you do, and then, through new and important information, reach a different consensus that shifts those thinking algorithms toward continuous learning, toward a new pattern of efficiency that is better and calmer, one that removes the constant stress that things are not working or not happening on time. But whose time? A time you preset yourself.
I want to add a nuance, because a company entirely of A-players is not automatically the goal. High performers often carry large egos, and a room full of large egos produces endless debate, sometimes without end. So while the founding core, the three or four or ten people who set the tone, should be high performers, a healthy company can and will contain a mix of types, and that is fine, sometimes even useful. The point is not to build a monoculture of intensity. The point is to make sure the people who set the culture, the ones the next hires are modeled on, are the right ones, and to keep arrogance and toxicity out regardless of talent level.
And notice that high performance is grown, not just found. Some of the best people I have worked with did not arrive as finished A-players. They arrived with the right principles and the potential, and they were refined by working alongside other high performers who mentored them, sometimes without either side calling it mentoring. So do not only hunt for the finished article. Watch for the person with aligned principles and real drive who is on the way to becoming one, and put them next to people who will pull them up. A culture of high performers does not just attract talent, it manufactures it, and that is a compounding advantage no single brilliant hire can match.
So build your core out of A-players, and involve yourself directly in choosing them, because the first hires set the type of everyone who follows. Refuse arrogance and toxicity, even when they come wrapped around a useful skill, because they spread faster than any skill can compensate for. Learn to recognize the pleasant feeling of a real high-performer and the feeling of blockage from a false one. And hold the same standard of efficiency up to yourself that you hold up to everyone else, because a company is only as efficient as the person at the center of it, and the complainer you most need to catch might be the one in the mirror.