Hire smart people and get out of their way

If you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove, you get it. You give them a very exciting, ambitious product and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work.

I'm a firm believer in hiring smart people and then getting out of their way. But each week having one-on-ones with them, just spot checking things.

The idea with autonomy is very reasonable and the right one, which is we work and we are hiring the smartest people we can find and we pay high salaries for that. So if you're hiring smart people, one way to think about it is you're renting brain power. So if you're renting all of this expensive brain power and then you give them no room to think for themselves, that doesn't sound smart, then you should actually hire less smart people and keep your costs down or something.

In 6 months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person.

They hear something from our customers about a challenge that they're having, and they're already pushing on what the solution for them is and not waiting for all the other things to happen that... People just go and do it and solve the problem.

If you want to get your team to do good work, there's a million different paths to do that. If you want to get your team to do great work, there's no shortcut other than to have an extremely high-trust environment where people lean into their superpowers in a way that adds up to something greater than some of its parts.

If you really care about the company and your long-term brand as an individual, as a manager, you realize what you want to do when you find the person that's better than you is you want to slowly get out of the way.