I was twenty-five years old and had never really managed anyone, never built a team. Now I was one of the CTOs in a massive company of almost 300,000 people. I’d experienced plenty of failure, but this was truly a new and exciting set of experiences to fail at. The rush of imposter syndrome was almost overwhelming.

Then they told me that anyone who joined the team would have to be drug tested.

I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or

nothing at all.

Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”]

So do the work. Know what you’re getting into. Trust your gut.

And when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

But more often the real shock of growth is that over time you’ll bring on people who are just okay. Relative to the amazing people you brought in early, they’ll seem unimpressive. Mostly fine, good team players, get the job done.

And that’s not the end of the world. As the company expands, you need all kinds of people at all kinds of levels.

You can’t wait for the perfect A+ candidate to appear for every single empty slot. You need to hire. The best of the best don’t always want to join a big team, or they’re tied up in another job, or you can’t afford them or give them the titles or responsibilities they want.

And sometimes the people you don’t expect to be amazing—the ones you thought were Bs and B+s—turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They’re modest and kind and just quietly do good work. They’re a different type of “rock star.”

By far the hardest part of growth is finding the best people—in all their different incarnations—trusting your team to hire them, then making sure they’re happy and thriving.

When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decency—an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respect—is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.

In truth, hiring was hard before we got the culture of the restaurant fully dialed in. When we had an opening, I’d find someone good to join the team—not necessarily impeccably trained, but energetic and enthusiastic about the mission. But even if that person was all charged up when they got hired, the residual negativity of some of their colleagues would eventually infect them. The fine-dining crew was still being snooty, and some of the remaining members of the old guard weren’t ever going to get on board. Three or four times, I hired someone I thought showed promise. But they’d last only a month before the flame of their enthusiasm dimmed and died, and then they’d quit. So the next time a position opened up, I didn’t race to fill it. Instead, I waited until another position came open, and then another, and then hired three great people, all at the same time. Instead of one new person cupping their hands, trying to protect the tiny flame of their enthusiasm, that little crew brought a bonfire no one could put out.