Brilliant Seed Engineers

Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under Entrepreneurship |

Adriana sent me this post with the disclaimer that it’s long but well worth the read, and I concur. Basically the gist of it is that you are only as good as your ability to hire good, and your ability to hire good is a function of your ability to hire brilliant seed engineers. I’ve seen this in more startups than I can recall, the early engineers form the foundation from which the company is built on, not just because they are smart but because they intuitively understand the machinery behind what the company really needs to do as opposed to what they say they need to do.

Good mechanical engineers understand not only the machinery but the principles at work behind the machinery, which then gives them the great gift of being able to reconfigure the machine to do something that is inherently more interesting. It’s no different in software.

FriendFeed seems to have a lot of this going on, which is reflected not only in the service but also in the deliberate way they go about building it.

The Done, and Gets Things Smart approach is also a way of finding great people, but it recognizes that the Dunning-Kruger Effect requires some countermeasures. It’s modeled on the early successes I’ve witnessed at Geoworks, Amazon, and Google, all of whom had one thing in common: they hired brilliant seed engineers. This boldface is really addictive when you get started on it!

[From Stevey's Blog Rants: Done, and Gets Things Smart]

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