Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring

That sounds about right, as someone who started and runs their own company. Having a decent idea for a product, being able to learn and having experience are good skills to have but they are not important towards the building of a company and leading a team. You could potentially build a product in a niche area, but you're not going to build anything beyond a very small business with those skills alone.

Running or building a company is about allocating capital, hiring good people and being able to manage them effectively, and being comfortable with delegating tasks to competent experts instead of trying to micromanage everything. That's how you get scale.

If you don't have those skills, nothing wrong with that, most people don't. Instead you find an existing company that has that, and you join them and offer them the skills that you do have.

One thing you quickly realize when you start a company is just how chaotic it is in ways you never expected from legal aspects, financial aspects, coordinating things internally within your company and externally with third party vendors and your customers, and you begin to feel the pressure of having competition that is constantly trying to shut you down, especially as you get bigger and bigger. It's very fierce and you are reminded that every single dollar you make is a dollar that someone else is fighting for.

If what you want to do is focus mostly on a product and employ your particular area of expertise then do not start a company, join one. Finally this extravert vs introvert stuff is nonsense, don't use it as an excuse or let it deter you. Plenty of introverts are incredible leaders that have managed to run some of the most wildly successful companies ever known. Look at some interviews with tech CEOs before they became successful; they are some of the most socially awkward and uncomfortable looking people you can imagine who seem to really hate giving talks, heck check out the infamous Zuckerberg 60 Minutes interview or other interviews from around 2004. Early Bill Gates interviews are only slightly less awkward as are interviews with Google's Larry Page.

The first three things you mentioned are still requirements for a successful startup. They're not sufficient, as you've pointed out, but if you have those three then you're off to a decent start.

Building a successful company is about far more than just building a product. If you're one of the lucky few that find product-market fit, you still need to scale the company and build up an organization that execute on the opportunity that exists. That is mostly a people and leadership problem, and not a technical one.

I don't know the details of your skillset, but maybe you can try launching a product that doesn't need investors and employees. So make your daydream about a product, not a product company.

Not all companies have to be big, and maybe you don't even need to create a company to create something helpful / beautiful / profitable / whatever floats your boat.

Hey, at least you're self-aware. :)

I think most of us programmer types struggle along similar lines; I can exert myself for short bursts to tick the extravert boxes you mentioned but it is tragically unsustainable.

WRT hiring, I've been looking for a job and had a number of interviews, perhaps 15-20. Odd thing is they've almost all asked for touchy-feely things such as my values, what's my favourite language and the like but no actual hard questions that tested my knowledge or capabilities.

The only org that did that said I beat everyone else and they're interested in having me (currently in progress in fact). Make of it what you will; I don't know what to think. They all want innovative problem solvers with deep knowledge but don't ask the interview questions that would show that up. It makes no sense.

Hi, I work for Pave (but I don't speak for Pave, etc etc).

> If I remember correctly, because they have your name, they also scrape LinkedIn data about you and try to get as much information about you as possible like job titles, etc.

I am not aware of Pave doing anything like this.

> I would not want my entire salary history to be shared with prospective employers so that they could definitively say "Well, this person got paid X in their previous position, we shouldn't pay more than 5% above that."

Pave does not share specific identifiable data like "John Doe got paid $X at EmployerCo".

Pave only shares aggregations like "people in San Francisco, with the title Senior Software Engineer, at companies between 100 and 500 employees, typically get paid $X at the 50th percentile, $Y at the 75th, and $Z at the 90th".

From Pave's website, https://www.pave.com/products/compensation-benchmarking-data:

> Benchmarking can never be traced back to an individual or employee.

I am not aware of any of these things having changed at any point.

this 100%

It's an old form, implying more that the person is going to tell you about what they learned than that they will teach you things.

yeah, it's business jargon. I can only imagine someone somewhere forgot the word "lesson" and was high enough status that the malapropism stuck

When a zero-karma 1-hour old account says things like this, one should beware.

how ethical is it to spam people's inboxes with unsolicited interview requests, especially when one has never shared their contact info with his company, nor shown the slightest interest in working for it?