“Fix your mistakes fast… but not too fast. If you are super-scrupulous about your hiring process, you'll still have maybe a 70% success rate of a new person really working out—if you're lucky.”
Fix Mistakes Fast, Not Too Fast
From Marc Andreessen, “How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with” (Pmarchive, June 6, 2007). The 70% line opens the section on firing.
The number gives a manager permission to fire. Even a careful hiring process will miss about 30% of the time; for executives, Andreessen puts the success rate at around 50%. If 70% is the ceiling, regular firings are part of the process.
Andreessen’s stated reason for the hedge isn’t about the person being fired, it’s the audience: “your great people are watching to see how you fire people, and if you do it too fast you’ll be viewed as arbitrary and capricious.” The audience is the team that stays.