Previous versions of our company struggled for a while. We spent all of our time trying to keep the company alive while marketing products that nobody wanted.
That changed recently. We now have concrete market pull and find ourselves in a strong financial position. We’re looking ahead seemingly for the first time, to new problems.
Among these new problems, we need to hire a bunch of people. We understand from prior experience that our early hires will define our company. If we make good hires, we’ll have a good company. If we fail to make good hires, we won’t have a very good company. We’re facing pretty high stakes.
But what makes a good hire? What kind of company are we trying to build? We’ve long known our preferences by instinct, but that vague intuition doesn’t easily translate into explicit language.
We consider our company engineering-led. The product comes first. Culture follows from the choices we make in service of the product.