“Good and bad people are both infectious, and if you start with mediocre people, the average does not usually trend up. Companies that start off with mediocre early employees almost never recover.”
Both Infectious
From Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook, in the section “Hiring & Managing”. Altman wrote the playbook at the startup accelerator Y Combinator to put the most general advice its partners give the companies it funds in one place, and then released it to everyone. The lines close a paragraph that opens by telling founders not to compromise on the quality of the people they hire. Everyone knows this, he says, and everyone compromises anyway when the need gets desperate; everyone regrets it, and “it sometimes almost kills the company.”
The paragraph ends with a rule: “Trust your gut on people. If you have doubt, then the answer is no.” Jim Collins’s line on this site, “When in doubt, don’t hire,” is the same rule.