Hire executives early and be extremely picky to avoid false positives

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 23:36

   with. Yeah. Look, I think that, uh, by the time you know that you need to hire an exec, it's too late. And there's sort of a trade-off. If you give me infinite time, I'll hire the best person. You know, I can find the best person. If you give me like five, six years, I can find a phenomenal person. But if you give me a very short amount of time, I can also hire someone quickly, but then the quality will uh not be great so what i did is i tried to hire ahead of the curve so like before we needed it that would give me more time so that i could run the search for a longer period of time and i could sort of increase false negatives and decrease false positives wait how did you do that false positives means that you hired someone that you thought was going to be great and they're not great you made a mistake now you have to fire them you know it's going to take you a year to figure

2. 24:21

   out that they're not great i mean you might know after six months but you're not going to fire your executive for six months so you're gonna say that oh that's uh you know it's not clear so you're gonna give it another six months then after a year if you have the guts you're gonna tell them it's not working out you know that might that might end there it might take another six months now they've once they've left you got to do the search again you're doing the search now you're gun shy because last time you screwed up so now you're hesitating you might go for a you might go for a compromise candidate which doesn't have any strengths but also no weaknesses and then you have to ramp that new person and so like you lost two two and a half years so try to avoid that whole thing so how do you do that then I mean it sounds obvious

3. 25:00

   Well, be really, really picky. So, skip on a lot of candidates who could be great. So, at Databricks, I've skipped and said no to phenomenal people who've gone on and done great things. And they have, like, a chip on their shoulder with respect to me. They're like, I can't believe you didn't hire me. Look at what I've done since then. Like, a big mistake by you. I was like, yeah, but my playbook was, err on the side of being just extremely picky, take a decent amount of time, start early, and most of those guys have been with me, and gals have been with me, like, a decade.

4. 25:28

   um i did so you you haven't seen the turnover in these i have i have you know i probably i think i would say two two cases where i made a mistake uh maybe more uh but two like really come to mind and then you said give yourself some time is that three months six months nine months to be picky i think it takes at least six months to do a good search maybe longer could take a year we have had searches that took a year right uh keep looking people settle you know people settle and they say look i looked at everybody this is the best we can get you know we haven't had a person in this role now forever you know just get someone in the seat right now and that's the problem okay so you you knew like look the two that didn't work out when i look back at the process i ran to hired us to all the signals were there you know even in the interview process they told me stuff

5. 26:17

   that kind of was outrageous and i knew it was outrageous but i was like well yeah i guess this person had a big fight with that person none of my business it's like wait i could be that person next so i when i look back and i do a post-mortem i always see like hey all the signs were there like what was i doing or you know in one of those cases i rushed through the hire like i hired it looked good like you know i went fast and then i think that back doors are phenomenal like dude Just do an insane amount of backdoors.

6. 26:45

   Yeah. You get like a phenomenal 360 view of a person if you just talk to all of their managers in their past. Just go talk to all of their managers. Do also all the front doors. I would say like 10, 20% of the front doors end up actually being truthful. 80% are bullshit. Ali, I want to switch topics on you. You had a rivalry, obviously, with Snowflake. It was an interesting rivalry over time.