Because in the beginning you’re not going to have HR to help you find and hire a world-class team. You won’t even have a recruiter. For the first twenty-five or so employees it’ll all come down to you and your cofounder—your vision, your network, your ability to convince people that you know what you’re doing. You can lean on your mentors and board (and hopefully early investors), you can put them to work to prop up your reputation, but ultimately you’re selling yourself and your vision for success.

You need a story people can get behind. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] People you respect. People who will help you create something great. Your team is your company. And your first hires are crucial—they’ll help you architect what your business and culture will become.

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.

The best way to share and embed cultural DNA is person to person. When you’re growing fast, the new people you just hired most likely have some responsibility to hire as well, so a week of orientation isn’t going to cut it.

If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who don’t, you will lose that culture. It’s just math.

So when bringing in new employees—especially execs—you shouldn’t just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think you’re done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated. Explain how you do things in detail so they don’t make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about what’s working and what isn’t, what you would do in their position, what’s encouraged and what’s verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves.

That’s the best way to immerse someone in the culture, style, and processes of a team. Give them the push they need to start running with the pack rather than leaving them standing on the starting line, reading some docs, hoping they’ll catch up.

Always remember that it’s scary joining a new team. Not knowing anyone. Not knowing if you’ll fit in. Not knowing if you’ll succeed.

That’s why I started doing brown-bag lunches with the CEO. Matt did them too. Every two to four weeks, we’d gather a crew of 15–25 new hires and existing employees and have an informal lunch. We tried to cross-pollinate different people from different groups, a good mix from around the company. No managers, no executives, no keynote presentations. Just an

opportunity for them to get to know the bogeyman at the top and for me to get to know them. They asked me about our products, our policies, about me and Matt and our history at Apple. About why we didn’t allow massages, about why we had so many code names. [See also: Chapter 6.4: Fuck Massages.] And I asked about what they were excited about, what they were working on, why they joined.

It was my chance to highlight why their role was important, to talk about how their team’s goals powered our company goals, about our culture and our products and new projects and what was going right and what wasn’t. New employees had the chance to come directly to me with their questions as well as meet existing employees who were already steeped in our culture, who could help them and lead by example.

Any employee could come to five lunches a year. And each lunch was a cultural inoculation, a vaccine against indifference and apathy, against thinking that what you do doesn’t matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are.

The rising stars on your team may not be clamoring for your attention, but if you help them to dream bigger and become more capable leaders, you’ll be amazed at how much more your team can do as a whole.

At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means you must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn’t willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.