Startup Wisdom That Goes Against The Grain With SafeGraph's Auren Hoffman

Key takeaways

1. Akhund hired his first two execs through an external firm, then the next eight through an internal recruiter or EA who built a candidate profile and emailed prospects from his own inbox, which got better response rates.
2. Show your first list of about 10 candidate profiles to other execs and future direct reports. Their reactions sharpen what you want, and you can then search for more people like the best six.
3. Hoffman argues you can rent top experts two to three days a month for strategy instead of hiring an exec. Akhund and Raj push back that good decisions need deep company context, and Akhund prefers giving hungry people a stretch role.
4. To test whether a senior candidate is hungry, give them a real assignment and listen to references. Hoffman says hard workers get described as such unprompted, and its absence is a red flag.
5. Hoffman says to judge founder pay by go-forward compensation, since vested equity is already earned. He suggests roughly 70 to 80% of what an external CEO would get, possibly through out-of-the-money options or stock tied to share price.