Great thoughts in this one, but missing what I think is the biggest key to hiring correctly in the startups I've been part of is what Paul DePodesta said in Moneyball - ""What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts... and the warts just don't matter." I've always thought that hiring in a startup is really like what the A's had to do in Moneyball - you don't have the advantages in terms of money, faci…
I disagree. InfoSec has these companies who hire #3, thinking they can underpay, and it's given the whole industry a bad name because of the shoddy work and dubious claims they make. They go in and play pass the hash, charge a lot, and the company is really no better off. No offense, but do you think the fact that you have made multiple attempts and not yet created a company that has become a prominent name in the in…
We're not one of them. Nor were any of my previous teams whether they were at my companies or at companies I worked for (whose names you definitely know).
"Prominent name" is a marketing thing as much as anything... I'd be willing to put the accomplishments of our teams up against most. Hitting $10M in revenue in under 3 years building a security firm with no investment and no debt isn't something I'm going to feel too bad about, even if we don't spend a lot of time making a big deal about that.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that a company that makes a lot of noise is the same as a company that does great work.... those venn diagrams sometimes overlap. And sometimes they don't.