Mah: Inexperienced founders should heavily involve investors and mentors in early hiring
Jessica Mah · 20VC: inDinero's Jessica Mah on Why Angel Money Is Better Than Institutional Money and Boards Should Work For Founders · Jun 3, 2016 · at 18:42
Jessica Mah, founder and CEO of inDinero, reflects on early hiring mistakes and how first-time founders should leverage advisors to evaluate initial hires.
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“If I had to go back in time, back to when I didn't know how to interview people well, I would have had my investors and mentors be a bigger part of my process to help me get the right first few people in, and I didn't rely on them enough to help me evaluate people when I didn't know how to do it myself.”
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“This is incredibly valuable, I believe, and I'm a hundred percent certain my business would not be half as well off if I had the money just sitting right there ready for me.”
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“When you put institutional money into your seed round, and they don't lead an A round, it really sends a horrible message.”
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“It's just harder to do that if they're not super patient capital, and you're not going to find patient capital with these early-stage institutionals. That's just not going to happen.”
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“There's an HBR study about this, how actually less charismatic CEOs tend to outperform the more charismatic ones, and you've seen this in the Jim Collins books, right? Like I think Good to Great wrote about this.”
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“Like, I think we have to change this attitude, thinking, oh, fundraising's a chore, it's a waste of time, it's not value-add, to thinking, actually, fundraising is really important, and we need to start accepting it as being Something that's, like, fun and ful…”