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Every hire builds copies of themselves
Hiring sets the bar
Everyone on a team sees what the acceptable bar is, and they set it for the people they hire. That makes a company only as strong as its weakest link. The bar for the people around a founder has to be very high, because removing someone is hard emotionally, and many people set it low without meaning to.
Anyone who watches enough founders ask whether to fire someone comes to see that the people you spend time with are what your life amounts to.
Why obsession matters
Commitment and obsession over the team, whether it's a company or a baseball club, carry the fun. When people start to lose them, the endless curiosity goes, and so does the competitive edge. A marketing team stops finding the campaign that works, a sales team stops finding the right motion, and a product team stops getting a customer to an aha moment.
Why does company culture follow its early hires?
MIT professor Edgar Schein argued in his work on organizational culture that founders' assumptions become embedded in a company through who they hire and what they reward. Employees watch which behaviors earn praise or go unchallenged, and they copy them. Each new hire then brings that standard into the interviews they conduct. The effect compounds as a team grows.
How much damage can one toxic worker do?
Economists Michael Housman and Dylan Minor studied about 50,000 workers across 11 firms in a 2015 Harvard Business School working paper. They estimated that avoiding a toxic worker saved a company about $12,489, while hiring a top performer added about $5,303. Toxic workers tended to be more productive individually, but they were linked with more misconduct and with turnover among coworkers. The paper counted the cost of that churn in its estimate.
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