Hiring and Parting Ways

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No one hires perfectly. You can't possibly get perfect information before you start. People need to go into hiring knowing that a 75 % success rate would be extraordinarily good. The most epic failure is hiring and not parting ways. If you're too afraid of mis hiring, you're also going to miss the unproven people that you took a bet on. And it wouldn't be a bet if it didn't come with risk.

Today’s episode is with Jack Altman, co-founder & CEO of Lattice. There were so many topics we could have gotten into with Jack as it relates to scaling as a founder and CEO, but we decided to dive deep on executive hiring, a huge challenge for founders.

The conversation starts with how the hiring profile for executives changes as the company grows. Jack is a strong believer that you should focus on hiring someone who’s a great fit for the next 18-24 months, not the next 5 or 10 years. (Here's the blog post he mentioned about the different stages a CEO faces.)

He also talks about the traps of hiring “too big,” whether that’s over indexing on BigCo experience, or focusing on seniority and titles that don’t match your startup’s current challenges. Instead, Jack shares more about why founders should focus on getting good at assessing and taking a chance on more junior, undiscovered talent.

Next, we dig deep into his end-to-end hiring process, from how he sources folks and what he asks in interviews, to why he sometimes does references on a candidates’ references. Whether it’s diving into how a leader might build out their team, or the red flags that signal that an executive candidate doesn’t have an ownership mentality, Jack shares tons of tactical pointers.

We also get into where executive hiring errors come from, as well as the leading performance indicators to look for and what to do when a new executive leader doesn’t work out. We end by chatting about promoting internally versus hiring externally, and why you should think about your executive team like you’re constructing a portfolio.

You can follow Jack on Twitter at @jaltma. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.