[Michael_Murray]

Great thoughts in this one, but missing what I think is the biggest key to hiring correctly in the startups I've been part of is what Paul DePodesta said in Moneyball - ""What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts... and the warts just don't matter."

I've always thought that hiring in a startup is really like what the A's had to do in Moneyball - you don't have the advantages in terms of money, facilities, and even equity value of some of your much better funded competition for talent.

In that situation, you have really only three levers to pull - 1) give up more than you want (which is what I've seen too many people do); 2) sell the benefits of the startup life and your mission; and 3) find talent that can perform at a similar level that's undervalued.

The place that I've seen startup hiring really add value is when someone can be incredibly effective at #2 (which the author talks about) and they can develop a process that effectively hires for #3.

I've built my last couple of companies in the information security space and #3 is especially important, because there's a significant premium paid for high-value talent in our space. So, finding talent who can perform at an extremely high level whose "warts" don't matter has been a life-or-death matter for creating a company that can compete with those in the space that have more money (either through funding or scale).

[lawnchair_larry]

I disagree. InfoSec has these companies who hire #3, thinking they can underpay, and it's given the whole industry a bad name because of the shoddy work and dubious claims they make. They go in and play pass the hash, charge a lot, and the company is really no better off.

No offense, but do you think the fact that you have made multiple attempts and not yet created a company that has become a prominent name in the industry means that your approach may not be working?

[Michael_Murray]

I entirely agree on the large number of companies who do crappy work in the infosec industry... there's a lot of them, especially in the penetration testing realm.

We're not one of them. Nor were any of my previous teams whether they were at my companies or at companies I worked for (whose names you definitely know).

"Prominent name" is a marketing thing as much as anything... I'd be willing to put the accomplishments of our teams up against most. Hitting $10M in revenue in under 3 years building a security firm with no investment and no debt isn't something I'm going to feel too bad about, even if we don't spend a lot of time making a big deal about that.

You're making the classic mistake of thinking that a company that makes a lot of noise is the same as a company that does great work.... those venn diagrams sometimes overlap. And sometimes they don't.

[AlwaysBCoding]

This is great insight. Really like the moneyball quote.