Song: Hiring technical team members without prior working history multiplies failure risk
Rick Song · He thought his startup would fail—then grew to $100M ARR. | Rick Song, Co-founder of Persona · PMF Show · Aug 11, 2025 · at 42:56
Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song advises early-stage founders against cold hiring engineers without prior relationship history.
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“If you're just out trying to hire, like, some random engineer or technical person that you have zero experience with or otherwise I've seen some of the statistics around this. Your probability of, like, failure is, like, not just, like, two x higher. It's, like, a hundred plus x higher. Like, you almost, your probability of success right off the bat is effectively zero.”
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