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- Joe Lonsdale on the most important hiring lesson he learned from Peter Thiel
Joe Lonsdale on the most important hiring lesson he learned from Peter Thiel
“When we talk about lessons from Peter Thiel, I think one of the most important ones I’ve seen from him — that I’ve definitely taken to heart in what I’ve done — is hiring for talent, ambition, and hard work rather than hiring for expertise.”
But as Joe explains, there are exceptions:
“If you have a company that’s already working and scaling — and there’s a machine that has to be run — you want to hire the guy who knows how to run the machine. That’s fine. That’s the operator who knows what they’re doing already. But before you’ve actually built the machine, you want to hire for raw IQ and hard work — someone who can just iterate and figure things out. That’s a different skillset than the people who run the machines.”