Hiring Tips from Pebble Watch Founder Eric Migicovsky

My name is Eric Mitch Akatsuki. I'm a partner here at Y Combinator.

The first question that I'm gonna tackle is: what are the qualities that you should look for when you're hiring for your startup? I have a bit of experience doing hiring from the company that I ran before, Pebble, as well as helping a bunch of founders hire their first employees. It really depends on this stage that you're at. There are different things that I think founders and CEOs should look for in recruits.

So let's start with the early stage. When you're just starting out, the biggest skill set or topic area that you should look for is flexibility of ideas. When you're starting a company, there's no roadmap. You're not following a set roadmap for what you're gonna do. You will inevitably change your idea, modify things, and eventually find a product or a service that hits product-market fit. But at the beginning, the quality that you'll look for from your employees, and really co-founders at that stage, is: do they think creatively? Do they think flexibly? Are they willing to consider different ideas or different paths? And will they attack the startup more like a problem-solving mission rather than just clocking in and clocking out?

The second biggest quality that I think actually would help at pretty much all stages of your company is trust. Trust is probably one of the most important things that I look for. At the beginning, I had some pretty shitty experiences hiring people that I didn't trust, in particular, it was contractors and really people who weren't in my kind of people that I hadn't worked with before. The best people that I hired were friends and fellow students from the university that I went to. People that I had worked on school projects with, that I worked at companies with, that I already had built up a personal connection and personal relationship with. And what I realized, looking back, was I trusted these people. I had worked on school projects with them. I had worked at companies with them. I knew their working style, and when we sat down and hashed out a problem, I trusted them to be able to come up with a solution independently.

It meant that I didn't have to constantly think, "Is that person gonna solve this in the way that I would ever would? Are they gonna solve it at all?" I just had this level of trust that they were gonna figure it out. And at pretty much every stage of working on your company, you need to have that level of trust because if you don't, you're gonna end up having to do the work yourself.

So the third quality that I look for, especially in the early stage, is a multidisciplinary skill set. When you're working on a company, there are a multitude of different things that you, as a founder or an early employee, will need to do on practically a daily basis: design products, debug issues, talk to customers, work with other team members, work with partners, work with external partners. And at the beginning, and at the early stages, it's rare to see an employee who can act or work only in one aspect of the business.

So the best people that I've hired really were able to display skills across the board, usually in one technical domain and then also in the software side of the business as well. On the technical side, I would not optimize for hiring necessarily deep experts in the field because at the beginning, you may actually change and adjust and chart a new course for your product. Having a heavily kind of focused skill set on your team might actually be a long-term penalty for constraining your development to a particular area.

So in conclusion, the top three qualities that I look for in an early-stage hire are: trust—do I trust the person? Are they flexible with respect to their creativity? And do they have a multidisciplinary skill set?