Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Hiring and avoiding the clown car

October 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Hiring and avoiding the clown car

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Starting a company is challenging in many ways, and so far I would say that hiring the right people is by far the most difficult. As MuleSource is still very early stage, we have to consider the role being filled, the personality fit and how it will jibe with the rest of the team. You also have to be extremely careful not to hire someone just because you want the problem solved right away. There is one golden rule that I have learned about hiring:

You bring in one bozo and the next thing you know it's a clown college.

Sure, it sounds funny, but I can vividly recall almost every startup I've worked for bringing in that one person or role that started a downward spiral. Some people call it the "B-player". And typically, B-players are not workplace educated enough to know to hire A-players. They hire B-minus or C-players and so on until you have a team of duds. Well-managed companies move quickly to rectify the situation whereas poorly managed companies empower further incompetence by allowing the situation to remain.

Of course, you have to be realistic about hiring otherwise it will just be you doing everything. Which is somewhat of the position we've gotten ourselves into-dramatically understaffed in everything but our support team. In my case this makes sense; support is the core of my business and we treat it as gold. But other areas, such as business development and product management are more challenging. As the CEO I have no choice but to triage until I can find the right people to bring in, and we've made some key hires with more in the pipeline.

Being that commercial open source is such a new concept it's very difficult to find people who are well versed. In many cases it doesn't matter--but it's all dependent on the individual. But I continue to wonder if the people coming out of companies like Oracle and Siebel really get it. Using the example of Oracle I wonder if the rest of the company treats open source the way that the management does. Matt and I have been talking about this for over a year. And now that I am past funding and into hiring I am concerned that we are a still in the same boat. Lots of jobs, few realistic candidates.

All this leads up to an interview in Fortune with author Michael Lewis. I read Moneyball several years ago and didn't get into it-mainly cause I could care less about baseball. But Lewis has great insight into the development of leaders and managers and how individuals drive innovation.

Have you found a common link among the innovators that you have written about?

In all these cases, just about, necessity breeds innovation. People are put in natural underdog situations where if they do things the way that everybody else does, they are certain to lose.

Where I have encountered greatness, there is an ability to go a different direction from everyone else while behaving with confidence and assurance as if you're just doing it the way things should be done. It's now very fashionable to be an innovator and to be a change maker. You get lots of people throwing the terms around. People think they are more unusual than they are. Whenever you see someone say, "I like to think outside the box," you know that they are so deeply in the box that they'll never get out.

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 29, 2006 03:10 PM

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