Minted founder Mariam Naficy on growing talent into leadership roles

Mariam Naficy is the founder & CEO of Minted.com and co-founded eve.com, which sold for $110 to Idealab in 2000. In the clip below she explains:

“If you can look for people’s unique talents and grow them from within, those people will often become some of the strongest leaders you have.”

Even though this is something that takes years to do, it is usually worth it. And it’s what she does with Minted:

“We take disciplines where we are not experts, such as finance and HR, where people do things better than we do and hire those people from outside. But for the things that we do that are differentiated and where our secret sauce lies—for example, crowdsourcing instead of traditional merchandising—we grow people from the inside. It’s a lot harder to take a merchant from let’s say GAP and say ‘we want you to unlearn everything you’ve learned over the past 25 years’ than it is to take a very smart person and build them up into a leader from within the company.”

As she points out, this is much harder to do when you have very little capital and can’t afford to let people fail and make mistakes. But with a capital cushion, this becomes easier. It allows you to hire advisors from outside of the company who can help these people grow into their leadership roles.

Source: Greylock “Blitzscaling 07: Mariam Naficy on Lessons From The Dot Com Days and Knowing When To Blitzscale”