Sean Mullaney
speaker
1,197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And the reason is, is because the talent that Stripe has built in every single role and function is some of the best talent that I've ever worked with.
It's really, I think, a lot of the magic about why Stripe has been so successful.
And when I got there, we needed to scale up very fast.
And in most organizations, if you're underwater and you need to hire quickly...
um you end up unfortunately lowering the the quality bar that's what happens like you know you can hire 10 great people over a year but if you need to hire 100 people over a year like it's hard um and so when we went out and started hiring um you know immediately uh the the kind of um the teams that are making hiring decisions there's a whole interview and then
a kind of board that approves every hire they're just like nope nope not this guy nope not this person nope we're not hiring this and i'm like how are we ever going to build like the bar is so high what were the reason what are the main red flags for people not been hired so my boss sat me down and just tried to explain to me like how do you like what is the bar um and the first thing is you know you said the intellectual horsepower is a prerequisite
it's like you can teach people skills right if you turn up and you're like you know hey i've never never worked in payments before i can teach you payments if you're like you know i've never even even if like i've never been a product manager before i can teach you how to be a product manager but you can't teach someone just raw intellectual horsepower which is a prerequisite to be great so
um what a description intellectual horsepower yeah and and that's not just like you know iq smart that is like someone who has a deep curiosity to always learn and you can you can ask people like if someone has had you know uh you know if someone's 25 30 years old you can tell the people who have this deep intellectual horsepower and curiosity to learn
because they will have accumulated enough stories, interests, and achievements over the way that it will become apparent.
What are the green flags?
What are the main things you look for?
So the other thing you said, which seems really obvious in retrospect, but isn't until you kind of make it explicit, is like,
If you get to a certain age in life and you have not had a kind of outlier achievement, right?
And this doesn't just mean like at work.
This could be like you were a, you know, kind of, I don't know, a star runner or, you know, you were an athlete, you were a chess champion.
There needs to be something in your life that you can point to and say, you know, did this person achieve a 1% outcome in any part of their life?
Right.
It's an outlier achievement.
Yes.
And I remember I took a couple of candidates into the decision process.
Showing 561–580 of 1,197 · page 29 of 60
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