4min chapter

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#329 Charlie Munger (the NEW Poor Charlie's Almanack)

Founders

CHAPTER

The Critical Role of Hiring in Startups

This chapter emphasizes the crucial role of hiring the right talent in startups, drawing insights from notable entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. It highlights the impact of initial hires on a company's future and provides resources for further exploration of effective recruitment strategies.

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Speaker 1
I think it's an absolute no-brainer to buy it. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. I will also leave a link down below for the book, but also for the website that Straight Press did. You can get a copy of the digital version for free. I will also leave a link down below for the conversation, the incredible conversation that you do not want to miss with John Collison and Charlie Munger. It's going to be one of the last unheard interviews that is released. That is available. If you're hearing these words now, it is already available. I will leave a link down below, but you can just go and search in your podcast player for Invest Like the Best, and you will see the conversation with Charlie Munger and John Collison. That is 329 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon. ago. They asked, how did history's greatest entrepreneurs think about hiring? All the answers. People think I have a better memory than I actually do. If people say, David, you have a great memory. My wife would laugh at that because I forget things all the time. It's not that I have a good memory. It's I reread things over and over and over again. Every single answer, every single reference you're about to hear in this 20-minute mini episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights. That option is now available to you if you like what you hear, if you think it's valuable, if you're already running a successful company and you want an easy way to reference the ideas of history's greatest entrepreneurs in a searchable database that you can go through at your convenience anytime you want. Then you can go to foundersnotes.com and sign up. I want to start out first with why this is so important. There's actually this book that came out in like 1997. It's called In the Company of Giants. I think it's episode 208 of Founders. It's two Stanford MBA students, if I remember correctly, and they're interviewing a bunch of technology company founders. And in there, Steve Jobs is one of them. This is, you know, right, I think, even before he came back to Apple. And they were talking about, well, yeah, we know it's important to hire, but in a typical startup, a manager or founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other people. And I first read this, Steve's answer to this, you know, I don't know, two years ago, and I never forgot it. I think it's excellent. I think it sets up why this question is so important. And you should really be spending, especially in the early days, like basically all your time doing this. In a typical startup, a manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people. Then Steve jumps in. I disagree totally. I think it's the most important job. Assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You take a lot of time finding a partner, right? He would be half of your company. I'm going to pause there. This idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius. Why should you take any less time finding a third or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10, were not so great, why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so great? small company depends on great people much more than a big company does. Okay, so to answer this question, the advantage that I have making founders and that you have as a bioproduct of listening to founders is not only that I've read, you know, 300-something biographies of entrepreneurs now, but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my Readwise app. And that means I can search for any topic. I can look at the past highlights of books, or I can search for keywords. So what I did is, first of all, like what I've started to do with these AMA questions is I read them, decide which ones I'm going to do next, and then think about it for a few days.

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