Learn to Duck

What I love about Tumblr and Twitter is that often the final piece of some concept that I have been thinking about, and wanting to blog about, makes its rounds. Sometimes, its just a photo or a song, that gets my brain up and over its block, but more often than not, its a quote from someone much smarter than me; someone with much more experience than me.

Recently, we have spent some time thinking about the people we want to hire at Graphic.ly. What are the keys to hiring the right kind of people? How do you make sure that the new hires will integrate well and explode out of the gate, adding immense value?

I, personally, have been spending time on this subject.  To provide a bit of context, I have probably hired 300 people in my life. I have made some great choices, and some horrible ones. As I think through the best hires I have ever made (a couple are at Graphic.ly, or will be soon), there seems to be a commonality: They all are curious, creative people that can make connections between disparate concepts.

Steve Jobs says it better:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

People that are inherently curious tend to experience things in life much differently, and much more often, than people who tend to be overly conservative. They tend to learn in ways that people who arent curious cant.

When I was maybe 10 years old, I wanted to know if on an oven burner, when you turned it on, and it got to red hot, if when you turned it off, and waited for it to go completely black if the burner would be cold. If red equaled hot; then black must equal cold.

So I turned on the burner and waited for it to get red hot. Then I turned it off and waited for it to get completely black.

And then I laid my hand down on the burner.

To this day, I have a burn scar on my wrist. I look at that scar and think about the hundreds of ways I could have tested my curiosity without causing physical injury to myself, but curiosity has no value without experience. That scar, which I hid for years out of shame of the stupidity of the story, has now become an indicator of the level of risk and acceptance of failure I expect from the people we hire.

During the interview process, I tell everyone the story of the burn on my wrist, and use it as an example of the type of company we are trying to build, and the type of people we are looking to hire. You must be creative. You must be unafraid to take a chance. You must be willing to stand behind your decisions, even if they lead to failure. You must be curious.

Without curiosity, the employee will never be innovative. There will be no growth in the product. Nothing will change.

We spend our days talking about interesting ways to get things done (we, of course, also, just get things done). Here is an example, on Friday, I was presented with an interesting opportunity. To make it happen, we needed to create a version of our software that we havent spent much time on.

I turned to Charley and Kevin and said, “can we do this? Oh, and by Monday.”

Kevin and Charley looked at each other, and said, “Dunno. But, we’ll try.”

For most of the day on Saturday, I sat near the two of them and watched them explore different options (I would have helped, but I cant code! Hmmm…something else to learn…sweet!). I watched them pull from previous experiences. I watched them take pieces of other products and use them as examples to help build this prototype, and by late Saturday, the project was 75% complete.

But most of all, I saw the joy in their eyes at being able to be creative and satisfy their own curiosity.

If you arent curious by nature, working at a startup is just not for you. But, if you are (and talented), I probably have a position for you…