Dear SaaStr: Why Do Founders Hire So Many Terrible VPs that Mislead Them?
I think it’s a combination of three factors:
- Trusting your team. It’s hard to scale if you don’t.
- Needing a team. You can’t do it all yourself. And
- Hiring folks to do something you don’t know yourself and/or haven’t done yourself. Because … then you don’t know.
If you hire a VP of Sales and have never done sales yourself, you won’t really know. If they are good, bad, or full of it. Same with marketing, engineering, everything.
You don’t really know until you’ve worked with a great one.
And it’s really easy to be misled and deceived by an executive “talking the talk” if you don’t know what to look for. That’s what I see again and again. Founders hiring the “smooth talker” for a VP role they’ve never hired for before successfully.
If nothing else, when you go to hire a leader for a role you’ve never done yourself before … find the very best person you can in that role to ask for help. To just take 2-3 calls. And just ask them to be an advisor. Give them some equity and if they want, some cash. And ask them interview the top 1-2 candidates for each role. They’ll know. They won’t be 100% right, you can still take the risk. But they’ll mostly know.
A related post here:
(Image from here)
