Young, early stage founder asked for any hiring thoughts - figured worth sharing with the twitter-verse if they can be helpful.
1a) Make people do the work they are going to do for you during the interview process.
1b) People talking about work and experience is basically useless, except to evaluate whether this job "makes sense" for someone at this stage of their life - do the dots connect or not? If you can convince people to do a contract project for a month first, even better.
2) Optimize for IQ/horsepower. Talent overruns experience in like 3-6 months and never looks back. If you love someone, but they are missing a skill, you're better off getting them to learn it than hiring someone more skilled but with less upside.
3) Optimize for low drama and ease to work with, in all ways. You want people who just want to get shit done and enjoy themselves, not people who want to bring their personal drama into the workplace.
4) People who went to the best state school in the state they are from, and were overqualified for that school, tend to be undervalued and have a great low ego/high execution/high IQ ratio. They have ivy league brains with middle class values.