The reason recruiting is so, so, so important—and a lot of it is obvious, I’ll skip the obvious reasons—but one non-obvious reason is that the best people truly only want to work with the best people.
Working with anyone who’s not at their level is a cognitive load upon them. And the more people they’re surrounded by who are not as good as they are, the more keenly they’re aware that they belong somewhere else, or they should be doing their own thing.
The best teams are mutually motivated. They reinforce each other. Everyone’s trying to impress each other.
One good test is when you’re recruiting a new person, you should be able to say to them, “Walk into that room where the rest of the team is sitting. Take anyone you want—pick them at random—pull them aside for 30 minutes, and interview them. And if you aren’t impressed by them, don’t join.”
When you do that test, you will instinctively flinch at the idea of them interviewing randomly a certain person that’s kind of in the back of your mind. That’s the person you need to let go. Because that’s the person keeping you from having this high-functioning team that all wants to impress each other.
You’re never going to be able to hire anybody who’s better than you are.
You’re going to have to break rules to get the best people because the best people are not cogs in a machine. They don’t fit into a neat and comfortable place. They’re multidisciplinary, and they have to temporarily don an identity of, “Oh, I’m an electrical engineer,” “I’m a software engineer,” “I’m a marketer,” “I’m a product manager,” whatever. But the great people are capable of anything. They chose to specialize in a particular thing, but their input is valuable everywhere.
You need to let your people be bored rather than busy. Always keeping them busy with make-work is not effective. You need to give them maker’s time—builder’s time—which means large amounts of uninterrupted free time to do deep creative work.
There’s only so many hours in a day. You’re going to work anyway. You might as well work on something big. The best people know that deep down. They want to work on something big.