Jason Droege: recommendation

Transcript context

…I love the spectrum of experiences you've had. You've sold golf clubs, you're helping achieve AGI, you could say. There's also a whole part of your career. We haven't talked about where you built tasers and body cams and drones and all these things. Also, peer-to-peer file sharing before anyone else. Final topic I just want to spend a little time on based on this experience is hiring and building teams, something that I know you have a really strong take on. That I've been hearing a lot on this podcast recently is this idea of it's more important to build the right team than find the most optimal top talent. Talk about that, why that's so interesting and important. As of late, I've developed a more nuanced view of this, which is for certain roles, you absolutely need the right experience in this current market. You see this with researchers, because the market's moving so fast, you don't have time to train up some people, so you actually have to go find people either who have the right relationships with customers that you want to get or you have to, who might not check other boxes but are awesome at that, might not check the classic boxes that I think you're referencing of they're a problem solver, they can grow with the company, they have a high trajectory, et cetera. I would say that's 5% of the roles in the company, but very important whenever speed to market is important. And then, for interviewing, I just interview for three things and I have to interview across all kinds of expertises, which is hard. I can't be an expert in everything. And so, I reduce it down to just three things, which is like, are you a curious problem solver and can you articulate that verbally? Can you work across people? Are you humble enough to work across and are you a good leader? And if you just do those three things, I think you have a pretty high chance of success, at least in an organization that I'm running, because the world's changing. So you do need people that are adaptable. So all the experience is not necessarily one-to-one relevant. And then, the working across to your team point, this actually came up at Uber Eats. So when I was building the Uber Eats management team, I'm not sure if this was mentioned to you from that group, but whenever I would hire people, I was trying to compose almost like an organism of strengths and then minimize the conflicts. That management team for the most part outside of some of the operations side, but for the most part, that management team was the same management team from day one when we had nothing to $20 billion. And I just believed that the team, knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses and being able to compensate for each other was more important than the classic advice you get around, "Well, that person hasn't seen this much scale." And you're like, "Well, yeah, but can they learn it?" I learned it. So you do have to kind of believe in people a little bit, which is my job, not necessarily their job. And so, I mean, these are people systems. They're not straightforward rules-based things you can apply. And I especially love this advice because there's all this talk about what skills will matter in this world of AI doing all our jobs, and it feels like these three buckets are maybe the same thing, just are they good at solving problems? Are they good leaders? Can they collaborate well with other people?…

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