On the other hand, I wonder about the philosophy from David Sacks. But I guess he's also admitting that when you reach a certain point, you need people who know how to get inside from experience in order to really hit it big. But when starting up, he seems to say avoid getting those people involved.
One of the lessons we learned is that professional managers hired from the industries you're trying to disrupt tend not to be very beneficial. This whole idea that Mark Zuckerberg should stay CEO of Facebook, as opposed to being replaced by a professional manager, that was one of the things we learned at PayPal early on. If you look at the PayPal companies, they did not try to replace the initial leadership with supposedly more qualified people.
Don't hire people from the industries you're trying to disrupt. They have too much ideological baggage about the way things have to work.
One of the ways PayPal was so successful is we did not know all the Visa and MasterCard rules we were supposedly violating. There were other companies who didn't pursue what we were pursuing because they thought it'd be a violation of the rules. In fact, was it a violation of the rules? At most it was a grey area because Visa and MasterCard rules weren't written for the Internet....
eBay certainly felt constrained -- this may have been a rationalization after the fact for losing to a company they so clearly should have beaten -- but they always said they felt too constrained with the risks and liability they could take on. PayPal was able to take on these massive liabilities because if the company didn't work it was going to go out of business anyway so there was nothing to lose.
BI: How do you apply those lessons here at Yammer? Particularly in hiring -- do you look for people who have never worked at big software companies?
DS: Yes. There's a strong strand of consumer DNA in our company. Out of the first 15 people who started, none of them worked at an enterprise software company. I don't think we hired anyone who had worked at an enterprise software company until last year. We came at it from a blank slate. What we've learned is there are certain enterprise functions we've had to backfill. There's been this steady process of starting with a consumer mindset and then saying, "OK, we need an enterprise sales team. We need some enterprise marketing to back them up."
BI: Do you find you need a big enterprise sales force to compete with the big guys?
DS: In the large accounts, yes.
http://www.businessinsider.com/david-sacks-qa-2011-11#ixzz1g...