Charlie Songhurst

It's that lucky soldiers become veterans, but veterans are good soldiers.

Meaning just the luck of surviving the first few hours put you up an experience curve.

And I see entrepreneurs transform in those first 36 months of leadership and management.

And half of it is just stay alive till you get good.

So I think recruiting is way underestimated, precisely because in an early company, people replicate themselves.

So because people tend to hire not so much in their own image, but with their own set of biases, all the initial people you hire will influence all the other hires.

And so you can either get this sort of upwards iterating culture of excellence, or you can get this downwards iterating culture of excellence.

So those first few hires are utterly critical.

And I think people way underestimate just the sort of the maths of the return, which is it seems excessive to say spend 100 hours hiring a person.

But if you're only hiring 10 people, that person is 10% of the output of your company for the next seven years if they stay.

But then if they hire as well, they may actually contribute 10%.

10% of the productivity of the company for the first decade, both by their own labors in the early years, but also in terms of the way they themselves recruit.

So I think people just sort of underestimate the power of the math here and don't focus on bias that entrepreneurs often have of going for speed and the desire to move fast.

And partly this has sort of come out of startup culture because of the sort of synergies of network effect businesses where speed often really does matter.

But 99% of startups don't have strong network effects.

80% don't have them at all.

Maybe 19% only have weak network effects.

And in those, quality matters far more.

And so going slower, spending an enormous amount of time picking exceptional people that are deeply synergetic, exceptional in and of themselves.

and then have deep and meaningful synergies with the other team members creates this thing, which is a sort of algebraic functional labor output.