Leadership
Experience is cheap in a world where computers do most of the work. What you are actually hiring is how a person thinks, because business is decisions, and decisions come from algorithms of thought.
When you hire, you are not really buying experience. You are buying the way a person makes decisions. Experience matters far less than the functional thinking algorithms that can produce any kind of experience, because business is about decisions, in every single moment, and those decisions come from cognitive processes, and cognitive processes come from algorithms of thought.
Let me be precise about why experience is overrated today. In a world where computers do nearly everything, experience can be accumulated very fast. So it is less important than it once was. What is not fast to accumulate is expertise, and expertise and experience are not the same thing. Expertise is what a researcher builds over twenty years, or a mathematician, or a chess player, or a nuclear physicist. That kind of depth cannot be picked up in a month. But the experience of someone with ten or twenty years in marketing, given how fast things change, is a different matter. You have to look past it, because you need to build new technologies, and the market keeps shifting, and new technologies will not be built with thinking algorithms based on old ones, unless those algorithms are actually principles of operation, and the person understood the essence of what is happening and can predict, to some degree, how things will go in a way that favors your business.
Notice the distinction hiding in there, because it is the useful one. Ten years of marketing experience can be two very different things. It can be ten years of accumulating principles of operation, deep patterns about how humans and markets actually behave, which transfer to any new technology. Or it can be ten years of memorizing the specific tactics that happened to work in a world that no longer exists. The first is gold. The second is a liability, because the person will confidently apply dead tactics to a live market. The résumé looks identical in both cases. The only way to tell them apart is to probe how they think, not what they have done.
So experience is only decisive when it is genuinely expertise. Otherwise it can be replaced by the thinking algorithms of people who may have little experience, or a great deal of it, it does not much matter. What matters are the functional algorithms of thought, the principles a person relies on in how they see things, how they see the industry, the world, how they perceive change. Nature is in constant change. The world, the choices, are in continuous flux. If we understand the essence and gather around us people who understand the essence, sometimes without even realizing they do, doing it instinctively, intuitively, because of how they were built or the experiences they had, then the company grows most easily.
Here is the counterintuitive result. A person with ten years in marketing, who accumulated real thinking algorithms along the way, can sometimes be equal, in terms of thinking algorithms, to a person who has been through only two formative events in their life, from which they formed certain algorithms of thought that lead to favorable decisions in what they do. Two experiences, understood deeply, can produce as good a decision-maker as ten years, understood shallowly. So in any interview, any conversation, any collaboration, the thing to understand is the person's thinking algorithm, not the length of their history.
This changes what you actually do in an interview. Instead of walking through the résumé, asking what they did at each job, you want to hand them a situation they have never seen and watch how they reason toward a decision. You are not checking whether they know the answer. You are checking how they build one when they do not. Do they gather the right information? Do they notice the essence, or get lost in surface detail? Do they update when you add a new fact, or defend their first instinct? None of that shows up on a CV, and all of it is what you are actually paying for, because the CV tells you what they have done and the reasoning tells you what they will do inside your company, on problems that do not exist yet.
Some thinking algorithms are formed through experiences, others through traumas, which we can also call experiences. Either way, what counts is the algorithm. Your goal when you hire is to make sure the people can make the right decisions for this business, and decisions come from cognitive processes, and cognitive processes come from these algorithms. A great CV tells you what someone has done. It tells you very little about how they will decide when they face a situation your business has never seen before, which is most situations worth paying for.
There is a second lesson wrapped around the first, and it is about team size and time. In many cases, especially at the start, it is better to have a small team. I once told someone about big results we had achieved with fewer than ten people, and mentioned that my experience at the time was not in running a large team. He, a successful man himself, asked me why I thought success in business meant leading a large team. It does not. A small team is often far more efficient. But you have to understand that at some point things may change, and this is a topic large enough that it should be broken into steps.
Step one, you begin building the company. It is just you, or you and one, two, three cofounders, and everything is in the honeymoon phase. You build, you launch, sales start coming, and you want to expand. Someone in the company will disagree, because their functional thinking algorithms, the ways their mind is used to working, will not go along with it. The mind finds it hard to leave the comfort zone, and arguments will follow. Say you get past them and hire a few people. Those people, in my experience, will bring the next cycle of the company's success, or its failure, depending. Let us take success, since we like it more. They bring the next cycle of success. And once the company reaches that cycle, it is almost mathematical that most of those same people will no longer be able to understand the cycle after that. So you either replace them, or pull them out of the comfort zone they put themselves in, because the mind attaches to positive experiences and those people, in most cases, will no longer be capable of adapting to the change.
That is not a moral failing. A person's existence in a company is cyclical. It has a term, a limited time. People generally stay until they have learned all the experiences they needed to. And that is normal, because we all want to evolve. But evolving does not mean the company's success. Evolution means each person's own path, each person's desire to experience, to grow in a way that, ultimately, is not about your business. So a small team is good at the start, but at some point that small team needs a shock to become a large one, and that shock might even be replacing all of its members, especially if the plan, and the plan always changes, no longer matches what you want from the business in its next steps.
The reason the change is so hard is attachment. Assume your business reaches a point where it succeeds. People, our brains, create attachment networks with that success. Those networks are hard to dissolve, and the effort to dissolve them will defocus you from your own path, so you have to ask whether it is worth it. Sometimes it is not, and even though it is hard, you will most likely, at some point, have to decide to replace some team members, compensating them fairly for everything they achieved up to that moment.
I want to be careful here, because this can be misread as cold. It is the opposite. Understanding that a person's time in a company is cyclical is what lets you treat them well when the cycle ends. If you believe good people should stay forever, then everyone who leaves feels like a betrayal, and you handle their departure with resentment. If you understand that they came to learn what they came to learn, and that their evolution is their own path and not a referendum on your business, you can let them go with gratitude and fair compensation, door open, relationship intact. The cyclical view is not what makes you replace people. It is what lets you do it humanely.
Underneath all of this is the thing that should drive your very first hires: values and principles. When you choose your first people, partners or employees, make sure they share your values and principles, or ones similar enough that you can relate to them, understand them, and trust that they will lead to constructive decisions for the collaboration and the business. Sometimes we do not even know our own values, especially at the start. We know we want to build something, but we have never put our values on paper. Occasionally someone outside helps us see them, family, a partner, a parent, or they surface in conversation. But it is nearly critical to check for shared or relatable values in the partnerships you form.
And here is the honest warning. Sometimes we are not actually looking for values. Sometimes we are looking for justifications of childhood traumas, reflected onto our partners, onto the choices we make about collaborators. It is worth being aware of that, and maybe stopping it before it happens, if we decide that would serve the business better. The self we hire from is not always the self that makes the best decisions.
One more distinction worth holding, because it saves you from a common hiring mistake: aggression toward learning versus resistance to it. You will meet people stuck on old ways of working, complaining that a task takes long when you know it could be fast, and the temptation is to conclude they lack the knowledge. But knowledge is not the deciding factor. The deciding factor is whether their principles of operation push them to go learn the new way when they hit its edge. Two people can be equally ignorant of a new tool. One says teach me, the other says it worked fine the old way. The first has a thinking algorithm you can build on. The second has one that will fight you at every technological turn, and there will be many turns, because the market never stops moving.
You can try to force the second type with pressure, do this or you are gone, and sometimes pressure does shift the underlying principles. But leading a company by force is exhausting and fragile, and I would rather select for the disposition up front than spend my life supplying it. Which is the whole argument in one line: it is far easier to hire the person whose principles already point toward learning than to install those principles in someone whose point away from it. You are not in the business of remaking adults. You are in the business of choosing the ones already built to grow.
So when you build a team, look past the résumé. Hire for the thinking algorithm, the way a person decides under uncertainty, because that is what you are actually paying for. Prize expertise, which is rare and slow, but do not confuse it with mere experience, which is fast and common. Keep the team small at the start, and accept that its members, and even you, will move through cycles, learn what they came to learn, and sometimes have to be changed out with fairness and respect. And build the whole thing on shared values, while staying honest about whether you are choosing for values or for old wounds. The company is a machine made of decisions. Hire the people who make good ones.