working hard is not the goal
a collection of notes and links I shared with my companies recently.
Every so often, I come on here and compile the most important things that I’ve recently shared with my founders/team.
This week’s list is about recruiting and culture - the two highest leverage things you can think about as a founder.
Recruit your friends
Some of the best hires/partnerships I’ve made were friends from past lives - people who weren’t even thinking about the industry I brought them into.
When I went to Rayyan with the early idea for Founders Arm, he was running programs & ops at a nonprofit — away from startup-land entirely.
Our entire advertising agency (we worked with Cluely, Friend.com, Zeteo, and Whop in our first 4 months) came from D2C ecommerce brand-building and supplements - not software & media.
Even Afra, who now runs much of the day-to-day ops at Alif, came from an event-planning startup and community background - not venture capital.
By the time someone is popular on X.com or known as “the guy/girl” for something, it’s too late. Even if you can afford them, your chances of retaining them are incredibly low.
Which is why the best recruiting strategy I’ve found is to find people who are exceptional at something, even if barely tangentially related, and bring them in.
Hire for slope, not status.
996 Culture
I’ve talked to some founders recently who yap on the internet about working 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week).
But it’s also what seemingly every successful founder did in the early days.
This is what the 996 crowd doesn’t understand. They post their suffering like medals. Screenshot their commits. Count their hours. They’re performing intensity to avoid asking if they even care.
~ Nikunj, 996 Is Not Your Competition
Before you have your own network or leverage, you just have 24 hours in a day to outwork everyone else.
From talking to some founders in SF, it seems that the ones who are the loudest about working 996 just go out for dinner together every night since they don’t have families, and then kick it at the office with their teammates (who are also their best friends) until 9pm.
They’re optimizing for the feeling of work, not actual output.
Over the long term, this isn’t effective. The founders I know who actually built something meaningful learned to identify the 3-4 things that directly moved the needle every week, and ruthlessly cut everything else.
I spoke to a close friend about this recently - he exited his most recent consumer-facing company for $1B+, and sold another for 9-figures right before, all in the same decade. He told me he almost never worked 996 because being home at a reasonable time to tuck his kids into bed was more important than the marginal increase in productivity.
And yet, he’s still had better career outcomes than 99% of people ever will.
Doing productive things > doing things to feel productive.
Interesting miscellaneous links:
How to build and run a massive billboard campaign
A look behind the Delve billboards we see across SF.
Naval on only hiring geniuses
Shared with a founder who’s just started the hunt for founding engineers.
Colossus piece on Ramtin Naimi
(incredible read for breaking into VC - longer post coming soon)
OpenAI ends vesting cliff for new employees
Interesting to see what companies are willing to do to win the talent war.
Messaging is a Moat, not a Business by Chris Paik
A timely read as antitrust cases like Poke vs. Meta start to pick up steam.