Hire for potential and hunger, not just experience

My aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox. We would hire a ton of really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales. If you take people that are just super smart, they've never done it before, one advantage of that is they can innovate because I think they come in with, I don't know anything. Let me just figure this out.

The more expertise someone has, the more it actually can lead to a false precision and then thinking they know what they're going to do. I actually think the expertise is more important later.

Professionals with a lot of years of experience from established companies, they don't have this strong urge to change status quo, which by the way will require toil, tears, and sweat.

We just need people who can run through walls to accomplish big goals. Maybe grit and endurance in some ways and drive are the words I would throw out there.

Bring in people who know content and teach them process, as opposed to bringing in people who know process and trying to teach them content, because that's a bloody hard thing to do.

I've never been able to change someone. You can never mentor someone out into being a good employee. I think you need to hire someone who already is fully formed and can do what you need.

If you're a team of 35 people, and you're trying to hire the director of whatever from a huge company, you need to ask the question of, when did this person join that huge company? Did they join when the company was already 5,000 people and from day one they had all the resources at their disposal? Or were they actually one of the earlier employees who helped that growth?