Hiring is one of the hardest jobs for startup founders — the quality of early hires can make or break a company. But hiring senior executives is trickier still, and Ben Horowitz has an interesting way to frame the hiring of senior employees.
Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the author of “The hard thing about hard things” says that senior executives should be hired to increase “leverage” for the CEO. “(You) only get leverage if the person that you hire can do (something) better than you can. As long as you feel like you’re better than them at it, you’re just going to keep second guessing them and you’re not going to get any leverage,” he explains.
“A lot of times I’ll be talking to CEOs and they’ll have an executive, and they’ll be like this person’s really good and they’re working really hard. And I’m like, well, you always feel like you have to do (their job) yourself. And (they say) yeah, cause they don’t understand how to do this and that. Then I say, they’re not an executive, because the whole point of an executive is to get you leveraged,” he added.
Horowitz seemed to be saying that lots of CEOs end up hiring executives but don’t really trust their judgement, or believe that their own judgement is better than theirs. This doesn’t give the CEO any leverage, because in spite of a senior (and presumably costly) hire, they still take most decisions on their own. Horowitz seemed to be saying that CEOs should hire senior executives who they believe are better than them at a particular task, and then let them make day-to-day decisions so that their own time can be freed up for other things.
Horowitz added that CEOs should hire senior executives in areas where they find people who can give them leverage. “Those are areas you should give up first,” he explains. “You want leverage in all spots because as CEO you can be the keeper of the vision and provide quality control over at the top,” he added. “You can’t be the lead engineer forever. (Former Google CEO) Larry Page is great engineer, but he is not an engineer at Google. He just isn’t. He cannot work on production products. It’s a full time job, even for somebody who can do as many things as Larry. (Similarly), I guarantee you’re going to have to give (some roles) up. So it’s just a matter of where do you get the leverage?” he explained.
Horowitz is suggesting that founders and CEOs ultimately have to delegate tasks as their company grows. The best way to do this is to delegate them to people who are competent — this frees up their time to work on the overall vision and quality at the company. And having competent senior executives provides some much-needed leverage to their overall vision and missions.