Hiring Advice

Hiring a COO isn’t easy at the early-stage and is wrought with more danger than potential success. Make sure you take the time to understand if you are ready for this hire. When it is done right, the impact on you and the company is tremendous.

The job description Bezos wrote for his very first employee said, “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.

Theory for excellence. "Excellence" is a surprisingly generalizable skill. People who've been great at *anything* are more likely to have the drive and self-discipline to excel even at something unrelated. In 2015, we hired a number of ex-Juilliard musicians with no engineering experience with the assumption that “people who know how to be

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Openness. You are not hiring a finished product, and therefore want to ensure the person is open to improvement and new ideas.

1. What to look for:
   
   
   1. Coachability: This trait has two aspects: responding well to feedback, and being self-aware enough to assess their own performance.
   
   
   2. Disagree and commit: Can they get out of their own ego and move

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