Who Should Your First Hire Be?

Hiring is hard. This is a topic that fills books. I ran into an old friend recently on a plane (public company CEO) and he put forward that the second biggest mistake you could make as a senior executive was to hire the wrong person (the first biggest mistake was not firing them as soon as you figured it out). When you’re a little company with limited resources, though, the temptation is to hire the first suitable candidate that walks in the door….your time is limited, the need to get help is acute and you may be feeling a bit humble about your place in the world (assuming your last name isn’t Andreessen or you aren’t funded by Kleiner Perkins). You may be tempted to hire someone who is more of a friend than ideal candidate (with the thinking, “I know them, I can trust them & besides, isn’t being able to make these decisions what having your own company is all about?”).

But this is also one of your first opportunities to show discipline and make a good executive decision. So who should you hire? Well, a key attribute of being an entrepreneur is knowing your own weaknesses. So, start with this hire. Map out the company’s next six months of challenges and hire someone who best complements you in the areas where you are weakest. While I would try to find someone who could stay for the long term, I’d worry less about whether they can scale into a senior position or will always be a role player. Just find that person who will give you the most leverage over the next six months. Someone who can own a set of discrete mission-critical (and everything you do should be mission-critical) tasks for the medium-term.

Add comment May 8th, 2007

eBay Launches Videos

In the last post, I talked about how we’ve been thinking about the stylization of video content even in commerce context. An article came out today in AdAge that shows how one very important company has thought through the same issue: eBay.

A couple of weeks ago, eBay announced here that they were going to let users start creating links to videos they had created to sell their products.

But that was, as they say, the least of it. As AdAge reports, eBay hired CAA who hired Smuggler Production who are creating 200 videos which are already inspiring other sellers to create their own videos. In addition, Smuggler is creating short videos about successful product sales. While today users are only allowed to link to the videos (and the links are kind of hard to find), soon eBay will move to full hosting.

All of the videos I’ve been able to watch (or read about) have been done with a strong emphasis on entertainment over information. The videos will also apparently attach to the seller’s profile after the sale is complete (as opposed to, say, similar products). So the purpose of the video appears to be about raising the profile of the creator / seller and branding more than a “seeing is believing” approach to selling. In theory, that fun patina should rub off on the eBay brand.

I like it. It’s very complementary to other examples of the “media / commerce” collision which we’ve started to cover here.

BTW – Here’s a link to another to a blog called “dot.com to dot.bomb and beyond”. Peter concludes by wondering whether eBay will buy Expo. Hmm….hasn’t come up yet.

Add comment May 8th, 2007