Three Hours A Day

I came across an article about Brian Chesky that mentioned he now spends an average of three hours every day recruiting for Airbnb. I suspect many CEOs would read that and wonder how someone running a company as large as Airbnb could possibly justify spending so much of their day interviewing people.

I had almost exactly the opposite reaction.

Three hours a day sounded like a lot, of course, but the underlying idea made perfect sense to me. In fact, the longer I’ve been building companies, the more convinced I’ve become that recruiting isn’t something a CEO should gradually hand off as the company gets bigger. If anything, it becomes more important because, at some point, you have to accept a fairly obvious limitation of leadership: you simply cannot make all the important decisions yourself. The only way to extend your reach is through the quality of the people you choose to make those decisions with you.

Chesky apparently came to this conclusion the hard way. Sam Altman had once advised him that a founder should spend as much as half of their time recruiting, advice Chesky says he didn’t take seriously enough in Airbnb’s earlier years. He does now. Recruiting has become one of his highest priorities, and he remains personally involved not only in hiring senior executives but also in hiring some of the people who report to them.

That last part is worth thinking about.

If you are building a company for the long term, the people one level below your executives aren’t simply somebody else’s employees. Some of them are probably your future executives. They will hire their own people, shape the standards around them, and gradually become part of the company's institutional DNA. By the time one of them appears on your radar as a candidate for the executive team, he or she may already have spent years influencing what the company has become.

If your name is on the orchard, you need to be involved in planting the the trees

I’ve believed deeply in this for a long time, which is why I’m willing to spend five or six hours preparing for, conducting, and following up on a final interview for an important senior hire at Yodo1. That is an enormous amount of time for one candidate, particularly when there are always dozens of other things competing for attention. But I’ve never thought of those hours as time taken away from running the company. They are running the company.

There is a simple reason for this that I wish someone had whispered in my ear when I first started building companies: you are going to spend the time on people one way or another.

You can spend it before they join, being patient enough to find an exceptional person, learning how they think, understanding what motivates them, checking whether their values fit yours, and giving them enough exposure to the company to decide whether they really want to be there. Or you can save that time during recruiting and spend considerably more of it later, trying to make a relationship work that probably shouldn’t have begun in the first place.

Anyone who has managed people for long enough knows what the second version feels like. It rarely arrives as one dramatic catastrophe. Instead, it comes in little withdrawals from your time and attention: the conversation you have to repeat, the decision you have to revisit, the meeting you suddenly need to attend, the additional process you create because something keeps falling through the cracks. Eventually, you can find yourself designing an organization around compensating for people who were never quite right for the jobs they were hired to do.

And when it finally doesn’t work, you start recruiting again.

This is why I’ve come to think about great hiring as one of the purest forms of leverage available to a CEO or team leader. Most decisions we make have surprisingly short half-lives. We can change the price and can change it again. We approve a marketing campaign and can stop it next month. We choose a product direction and, painful as it might be, can choose another one. Even strategies that once seemed terribly important eventually get replaced as the world around us changes.

Hiring a great person is different because the decision compounds over time.

Hire an extraordinary leader, and that person will make thousands of decisions you will never see. More importantly, that person will hire other people, who will make thousands more. They will decide what success looks like, what gets tolerated, which problems deserve attention, and how people behave when nobody senior is in the room. Years later, you may be able to trace a surprisingly large part of the company back to the moment somebody said, “I think we should hire her.”

This is also why I think we sometimes make company culture much more mysterious than it needs to be. We write values and put enormous effort into explaining them. We organize off-sites, develop training programs, and have long conversations about the culture we want to create. All of that can be useful, but culture mostly arrives through the front door disguised as people.

Every person you hire changes the culture a little.

If you consistently hire people who are curious, the company becomes more curious. If you hire people who are comfortable disagreeing with one another and can learn to do it productively, the company becomes more comfortable with disagreement and dialogue. If you hire people who instinctively take responsibility rather than waiting to be told what to do, ownership starts spreading through the organization without anyone having to put “ownership” on a poster.

The reverse is equally true and, unfortunately, just as powerful. For example, if you hire people who are very risk-averse, the company culture will naturally stop taking risks and miss opportunities. Hire people who like to be told exactly what to do, and over time, everyone will lose their agency, and those who desire to keep it it will leave.

This is where I think some CEOs get the sequence backward. As the company grows, recruiting becomes more process-based, which is necessary, and this process gradually fosters a degree of delegation. Before long, the CEO meets only the top candidates, while the rest of the organization is responsible for deciding who enters the company.

I certainly believe in having excellent recruiters and hiring managers. But I don’t think the conclusion follows that senior leaders should therefore become less involved in recruiting. The better the recruiting organization becomes, the more leverage it should give leaders to spend their time on the part that only they can do: getting to know extraordinary people and convincing some of them that the next chapter of their lives should be written with you.

There is something else happening in those conversations, too. When I interview someone, I’m not simply deciding whether I want them to join Yodo1. They are deciding whether they want to join us. I have to explain what we’re trying to build, why I think it matters, where we are struggling, and what might be possible if we get it right. I have to listen carefully enough to understand what this person wants from the next several years of their life and decide whether those two stories might fit together.

That isn’t an HR transaction. It is one of the most human things a CEO does.

Paul Graham’s essay on “Founder Mode,” partly inspired by Chesky’s experience at Airbnb, challenged the conventional idea that the founder’s job is to hire capable executives and then stay out of their way. I think there is an important distinction buried in that debate. Granting people authority does not require you to set aside your curiosity, and trusting a business unit leader does not mean becoming indifferent to the people that leader brings into the company.

Actually, I think the opposite may be true. The more authority you delegate, the more important the quality of the people receiving that authority becomes.

Which brings me back to those three hours a day.

I don’t know whether three is the right number. I doubt Chesky believes there is anything magical about it either. What interests me is that his calendar reflects his conviction. He says hiring is one of the most important things he does, yet he spends a substantial portion of his life doing it.

There is a useful test in there for all of us who lead companies, because calendars have an uncomfortable way of revealing the difference between what we say is important and what we really believe is important.

If I tell you that people are the most important part of Yodo1, but you look at my calendar and discover that I barely spend any time finding them, interviewing them, or persuading them to join us, you should probably pay more attention to my calendar than to my words.

After all these years of building companies, I don’t think I’ve found many shortcuts that actually work. But I have found one decision that seems to make almost everything that follows either easier or harder.

Choose the people extraordinarily well.

Then let them surprise you with what they build.