Things we've learned about building products

Ya I have yet to meet anyone who is passionate about analytics plumbing surprisingly, I’m glad posthog has found the 4 people in the world who truly are.

What this really translates to is the founders saying “we think posthog is our golden ticket to becoming rich in an exit event someday, so don’t mess it up for us”. It’s just not politically correct to say that, so it’s expressed as being “passionate about the problems the company solves” or “working on something that feels yours”.

And if you’re not someone who wants to dance and clap along with the founders as they sing “I’ve got a golden ticket!” on the way to the chocolate factory, only to be left standing behind the gate as they enter, then ya go ahead and pivot because you’re killing the vibe here…

If you’re very product or customer focused, you can be passionate about anything.

When I’ve worked at shops that made products I, personally, didn’t care about, it was always satisfying to see a customer be excited about a feature or be thankful for the tool I’m building.

The first time that happened was when an admin thanked me in a support ticket for speeding up the generation of expense report spreadsheets way back.

> Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires.

You’re almost 10 times more likely to be accepted to Stanford’s undergraduate program than to ever work as a hogger

Wait, i wouldnt hire someone who is ok spending so many hours after the first few hours, it shows me that he or ave can't handle the sunk cost trap and will fall again and again. But ok, that's my wr9ng opinion about this

The funny thing is that small companies that create a hiring process like this because they will only tolerate working with the best people actually end up selecting the best of the most desperate people, which was usually not the intention.

I've worked at many startups over the years and I've always been very involved in hiring, I call this the MDE (most desperate engineer) effect and it's something I always try to make founders, other engineers, etc... understand when the company starts to discuss hiring processes more.

The premise is simple, the difficulty of your hiring process needs to be directly corelated to the perceived future value of said company. If you are an OpenAI right now, you can have the most difficult, convoluted, time intensive hiring process in the world and the best engineers will still sit through it because they score very high in potential future value. Other companies cannot / should not have as difficult of a hiring process because you will end up selecting from a pool of people who are willing to endure anything just to get a job, get experience, get a job that pays in USD, renew their H1B visa, etc...

This doesn't mean these people are bad engineers or shouldn't be considered, but if I had a dollar for every time a founder or CTO at a startup said that this company is only hiring the best, most passionate people bar none I would be a rich man, and a lot of the people in this category just need a job to put food on the table (which seems to be exactly the kind of people the company wants to avoid at all costs funnily enough).

We had enormous success at the startups I worked at where we would talk to great engineers who worked at FFANG companies and explain the problems we wanted to work on, how we were thinking of approaching it, why it was interesting to us, where we saw the company going, and how they could help us get there as opposed to trying to squeeze them through a long tedious interview cycle. Granted these people did have previous work experience to help vet them, but again the process is something that can be adjusted depending on where the company is and what you are looking for.