Startup Wisdom

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Hiring

Every resource in the archive tagged with hiring.

27 resources

1997 Letter to ShareholdersLetter

1997 Letter to Shareholders

Jeff Bezos

Mar 1998 · 7 min read

Jeff Bezos' original letter to shareholders is reprinted from Amazon's 1997 Annual Report.

Labor and Capital Are Old LeverageEssay

Labor and Capital Are Old Leverage

Naval Ravikant

Apr 2019 · 4 min read

Labor and capital are old leverage: both must be granted by others and are hard to scale.

Guide to Big Companies: Retaining great peopleEssay

Guide to Big Companies: Retaining great people

Marc Andreessen

Jul 2007 · 12 min read

How big companies lose their best people, and what it takes to keep them.

How Things Get DoneEssay

How Things Get Done

Sam Altman

3 min read

Things get done through focus on two or three priorities and strong personal relationships.

Employee RetentionEssay

Employee Retention

Sam Altman

5 min read

Why keeping early employees matters more than hiring them, and three strategies that actually work.

How to HireEssay

How to Hire

Sam Altman

12 min read

Hiring is the most important thing a founder does; spend a third to half your time doing it well.

Startup Advice, BrieflyEssay

Startup Advice, Briefly

Sam Altman

4 min read

Start with a project, not a company, so you can find something great to work on without premature commitment.

Keith Rabois on how to identify great talentVideo

Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent

Keith Rabois

Mar 2026 · 1 min read

How to spot great talent: expand each person's responsibilities until they break.

Sam Altman explains how he decides to invest in a startup after 10 minutesVideo

Sam Altman explains how he decides to invest in a startup after 10 minutes

Sam Altman

Mar 2026 · 1 min read

What a 10-minute YC interview reveals about a founder's potential.

Hiring ExecutivesEssay

Hiring Executives

Ben Horowitz

9 min read

The hard decisions and strategies for hiring and promoting executives as your company scales.

Why Startups Should Train Their PeopleEssay

Why Startups Should Train Their People

Ben Horowitz

9 min read

Training employees builds competitive advantage and reduces turnover in high-growth startups.

How to Minimize Politics in Your CompanyEssay

How to Minimize Politics in Your Company

Ben Horowitz

9 min read

Strategies for reducing destructive internal power dynamics and factionalism in growing companies.

A Good Place to WorkEssay

A Good Place to Work

Ben Horowitz

9 min read

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

2020 Letter to Shareholders — FarewellLetter

2020 Letter to Shareholders — Farewell

Jeff Bezos

Apr 2021 · 25 min read

Bezos's parting message in his final shareholder letter as CEO, framed via a Richard Dawkins passage on biological homeostasis.

Super-Successful CompaniesEssay

Super-Successful Companies

Sam Altman

5 min read

The defining traits of founders whose startups become extremely successful.

What I Wish Someone Had Told MeEssay

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

Sam Altman

1 min read

How to start and scale ambitious things: recruiting, focus, speed, conviction, and fighting bureaucracy.

Hard StartupsEssay

Hard Startups

Sam Altman

2 min read

Altman's core thesis: ambition is a recruiting and gravitational advantage, not a liability.

Startup PlaybookEssay

Startup Playbook

Sam Altman

34 min read

A founder's guide to the core elements of starting a successful startup: idea, team, product, and execution.

Luck and the EntrepreneurEssay

Luck and the Entrepreneur

Marc Andreessen

Aug 2007 · 8 min read

Four distinct kinds of luck shape entrepreneurial success, each requiring different personality traits and behaviors to activate.

How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked WithEssay

How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked With

Marc Andreessen

Jun 2007 · 12 min read

Drive, curiosity, and ethics matter more than raw intelligence when hiring the best people for a startup.

Guide to Startups, Part 9: How to hire a professional CEOEssay

Guide to Startups, Part 9: How to hire a professional CEO

Marc Andreessen

Aug 2007 · 1 min read

Don't hire a professional CEO if no one on your founding team can do it—sell instead.

Guide to Startups, Part 8: Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executivesEssay

Guide to Startups, Part 8: Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives

Marc Andreessen

Aug 2007 · 16 min read

How to hire, manage, promote, and fire executives at a startup, with specific guidelines for each stage.

Guide to Startups, Part 6: How much funding is too little? Too much?Essay

Guide to Startups, Part 6: How much funding is too little? Too much?

Marc Andreessen

Jul 2007 · 9 min read

How much funding a startup should raise: enough to reach product/market fit or full exploitation, with a buffer for setbacks.

Mean People FailEssay

Mean People Fail

Paul Graham

Nov 2014 · 5 min read

Meanness correlates with startup failure because it costs you talent and prevents the transcendent thinking startups require.

How to Start a StartupEssay

How to Start a Startup

Paul Graham

Mar 2005 · 43 min read

Three things determine whether a startup succeeds: good people, a product customers want, and spending little money.

Founder ModeEssay

Founder Mode

Paul Graham

Sep 2024 · 5 min read

Founder mode—how founders run companies—works better than manager mode, the standard advice they're given.

Guide to Startups, Part 1: Why not to do a startupEssay

Guide to Startups, Part 1: Why not to do a startup

Marc Andreessen

Jun 2007 · 10 min read

The emotional, logistical, and interpersonal reasons why starting a company is much harder than most people realize.