Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise As a CEO scaling your business, you’ll invariably want to hire in new senior people from the outside. Even if you promote aggressively from within, if you’re growing quickly enough, you’ll just need more bodies. And if you’re growing really fast, you will be missing experience from your employee base that you’ll need to augment. For years, I’ve thought and heard that there’s a basic tradeoff in hiring senior people — you can hire someone with great domain expertise, or you can hire someone with great functional expertise, but it’s almost impossible to find both in the same person, so you need to figure out which is more important…
Tag
hiring
The Best Place to Work, Part 1: Surround yourself with the best and brightest
First in my series of posts around creating the best place to work is to Surround yourself with the best and brightest. This one is simple. Build the best team you can possibly build…as you need it. As a founder, you may be the best person at doing everything in your company, especially if you are a technical founder. But as my long-time Board member at Return Path Greg Sands always says, when the organism grows, cells start to specialize. Eventually, you need a liver and a brain. Just like companies need a head of sales and a CFO (not to imply that Anita likes the occasional cocktail or that Jack likes math – turns out both like both). How…