“Do not hire chronically negative people. They do not fit what an early-stage startup needs—the rest of the world will be predicting your demise every day, and the company needs to be united internally in its belief to the contrary.”
Belief to the Contrary
From Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook, in the section “Hiring & Managing”. Altman wrote the playbook at Y Combinator to put the partners’ most general advice in one place, then released it to everyone. The line is its own paragraph, right after the one telling founders not to compromise on the quality of their hires.
Altman ties the reason to the stage. The rest of the world, he writes, will be “predicting your demise every day,” so the belief that the company will survive has to come from inside it, and he wants that belief unanimous: “united internally in its belief to the contrary.” A chronically negative hire breaks that unity from the inside.
Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s first hire, describes Elon Musk running the same filter after hiring rather than before it, in a quote on this site: “if people were negative, they were not in the next meeting.”