Hire for Strength, Not Lack of Weakness

From Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (HarperBusiness, 2014). Horowitz had been writing this principle in his own voice since 2010, four years before the book. In “On Micromanagement” (a16z, April 5, 2010), he put it as a rule: “When hiring and when firing executives, you must therefore focus on strength rather than lack of weakness.” He returned to it that fall in “Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?” (a16z, October 13, 2010), where he names the failure mode: optimizing for absent weakness optimizes for pleasantness. The fix Horowitz proposes is to figure out which strengths the role actually requires, then find someone world-class at those and accept the weaknesses that come with them.