- Startup Archive
- Posts
- Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a really long time to hire people
Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a really long time to hire people
Everybody tells you “work really hard to hire the best people.” But as Patrick explains, that’s not helpful because everyone knows they should do that. As he puts it:
“The question is to what length should you go and what does that actually mean in practice? And in practice, it means being okay waiting a really long time to hire people.”
It took Stripe six months to hire their first two people, and six more months to hire another 3-4 people. He can think of five people at Stripe who took 3+ years to hire.
“If you think about the smartest people you know, if you want to get them to work on your thing, chances are they already have pretty good paths ahead of them… You have to be way more persistent and be okay with it taking way longer than any sane or reasonable person would think it should take.”
There’s an important compounding effect here — hiring just one great person will make it marginally easier to get the next great person. Patrick argues you should also view every person you hire as bringing along another 50 people just like them if your company is successful:
“Even if they don’t literally hire 50 people, they will be so influential in determining the selection of those 50 people.”