Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 25Hire Slowly, Fire Quickly

Matt Blumberg

Matt is the founder and CEO of Return Path, a company that provides email deliverability services. Matt has been a Techstars mentor since 2009.

In software and service companies, people are everything. It’s not just that they come first. They come first, second, and third. The earlier stage the company, the more critical each incremental new person is. Think about it—if you have 10 people in your company and you are hiring a new person, you are adding 9% to your workforce in one shot! You’re also hiring someone who will very likely have an impact on how the DNA of your organization develops, since it’s still embryonic in the first few years, even if it is dominated by strong-willed founders.

When a startup decides it needs to hire a new person, it wants to hire them right away. When it has hired the person, the startup is loath to let them go if they aren’t working out because they think they need them so badly. The desperate need for people in an early-stage startup creates two related temptations to avoid as you build out your team.

Temptation 1: Hiring too quickly. Just having a warm body in an open role that you need filled immediately doesn’t get the job done. When you are hiring such a large percentage of your workforce, you have to have a super-high success rate. At Return Path, we have sometimes left critical jobs open for months as we cycle through candidates looking for “the one.” As painful as it has been for us to ...