Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring

It’s not pulled out of nowhere; his mental framework comes out of the management consulting playbook where you divide up the subject into groups A and B (usually only two groups) and try to glean superficial insights about one or the other for your customers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to LinkedIn, Matt Schulman has a degree from Wharton. He is the archetypal tech bro wearing the trappings of nerddom. 15 years ago he’d have been spewing something analogous from a stone-clad building on Wall St

Sometimes I daydream about starting a product company and my thinking goes like this:

Do you have a decent idea that solves a real problem? - yes, check.

Do you have respect for the iterations and learning required to find product market fit? - yes, check.

Do you have years of relevant engineering and product experience and can you build and execute on stuff? - yes, check.

But then my thoughts turn to what seems to actually matter (re-enforced by articles like this):

Are you an extravert who wants to spend all their time talking to investors and raising money? - no, fail.

Are you an extravert who wants to spend the other half of all their time interviewing and hiring new employees? - no, fail.

Have you ever actually met an extravert who you would trust enough to delegate these two critical responsibilities above? - no, fail.

That sounds about right, as someone who started and runs their own company. Having a decent idea for a product, being able to learn and having experience are good skills to have but they are not important towards the building of a company and leading a team. You could potentially build a product in a niche area, but you're not going to build anything beyond a very small business with those skills alone.

Running or building a company is about allocating capital, hiring good people and being able to manage them effectively, and being comfortable with delegating tasks to competent experts instead of trying to micromanage everything. That's how you get scale.

If you don't have those skills, nothing wrong with that, most people don't. Instead you find an existing company that has that, and you join them and offer them the skills that you do have.

One thing you quickly realize when you start a company is just how chaotic it is in ways you never expected from legal aspects, financial aspects, coordinating things internally within your company and externally with third party vendors and your customers, and you begin to feel the pressure of having competition that is constantly trying to shut you down, especially as you get bigger and bigger. It's very fierce and you are reminded that every single dollar you make is a dollar that someone else is fighting for.

If what you want to do is focus mostly on a product and employ your particular area of expertise then do not start a company, join one. Finally this extravert vs introvert stuff is nonsense, don't use it as an excuse or let it deter you. Plenty of introverts are incredible leaders that have managed to run some of the most wildly successful companies ever known. Look at some interviews with tech CEOs before they became successful; they are some of the most socially awkward and uncomfortable looking people you can imagine who seem to really hate giving talks, heck check out the infamous Zuckerberg 60 Minutes interview or other interviews from around 2004. Early Bill Gates interviews are only slightly less awkward as are interviews with Google's Larry Page.

The first three things you mentioned are still requirements for a successful startup. They're not sufficient, as you've pointed out, but if you have those three then you're off to a decent start.

Building a successful company is about far more than just building a product. If you're one of the lucky few that find product-market fit, you still need to scale the company and build up an organization that execute on the opportunity that exists. That is mostly a people and leadership problem, and not a technical one.