I have always loved the videos illustrating orders of magnitude of scale. It simply seems a marvel that the world around us encompasses all these different scales. It turns out to also be a useful way to think about ability when you are recruiting. Talent comes in orders of magnitude. Before going to recruiting for startups, consider talent in tennis for a moment. At one level I am a decent player in that I can hit the ball reasonably hard and look good doing so (ok so that is subject to interpretation). But I wouldn’t stand a chance against most (all?) varsity high school players. And those varsity high school players wouldn’t do well against most players on the pro tour. And even with the pro tour the top 100 seem to be able to beat the rest most of the time. In tennis there are 4-5 orders of magnitude of ability (or maybe more).
As an entrepreneur you need to think about the existence of magnitudes of ability as you hire. That is especially hard when you are a first time founder as you likely don’t have a lot of experience recruiting. I certainly made that mistake on my first go-around. I hired some people who were merely OK or good instead of great and awesome (and I hired some that weren’t even OK). It is hard to appreciate the orders of magnitude of talent when you haven’t experienced it. You don’t really know what a fantastic VP of Marketing is like if you have never worked with one. So how do you deal with that? First, get help from people with more experience with talent. That might be your board members, but it might also be advisors with domain knowledge and sometimes even recruiters. Second, constantly try to “hire up." Hire team members who want to challenge themselves and will do so in part by hiring people who are more capable. And third, always keep the orders of magnitude metaphor in mind (go ahead and watch another awesome video).
