“Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first at least 100 employees and often many more.”
The First Hundred Are Referrals
From Sam Altman’s Lecture 2, “Team and Execution,” of Stanford’s CS183B course “How to Start a Startup,” delivered September 2014 (course site, archived, video). In the same passage Altman states the operating rule plainly: “The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.”
His example is Facebook and Google. Altman says both institutionalize referrals from week one: a new hire’s first weeks include an HR person who “sits you down and beat out of you every smart person you’ve ever met.” Referrals at those companies are a process that gets run, not a surface that gets scraped when an opening appears.
The barrier Altman calls out is social. Most founders feel awkward calling everyone good they have ever met and asking their employees to do the same. The lecture’s instruction is to push past that discomfort and work the network anyway.