More on early hiring…”passion”

May 17th, 2007

Here’s a link to a great post on early hiring by Luke Sontag that’s up at Found+Read. He focuses on passion as a key differentiator. It’s a great complement to my post below which focuses on leveraging skillsets. For me, the importance of passion in start-ups is that virtually every issue will look insurmountable at first. The appropriate response to “insurmountable” issues in a corporate context is to wait or to try a different direction…to methodically plot your course. In a start-up, you just need to smash blindly against those barriers with everything you’ve got and to enjoy the pain. If the guy beside you is doing it, too, well, that’s the rocket fuel that keeps you going. On the other hand, if one guy is pointing out all of the challenges and going home at 5pm, it can drain the energy out of the entire company. Great post, Luke.

Entry Filed under: Life as a Start Up