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You can't coach someone to care
Caring can't be coached
Personalities can change, and people can learn to work with others better. Rough edges get smoothed over with a few drinks together. It is really hard to make someone give a damn, so the hiring screen is for high agency and high ownership.
The hiring miss
When a hire goes wrong, the thing missed in the interview is agency and ownership, which are really hard to assess. Hiring in San Francisco is brutal and retention is difficult, though it is easy to get someone when the company is on a rocket ship. The hard part is making the right decisions about whom to hire.
Attrition to founding
Among the people on the closest teams, the only attrition has been people leaving to found companies. Losing someone to starting a company beats losing them to another job, though it makes management harder, because so many high-agency, ambitious people are involved.
Why is agency hard to assess in interviews?
Interviews capture what people say they would do, while agency shows up in unstructured moments with no one asking. Schmidt and Hunter's 1998 review found that unstructured interviews predicted job performance less well than work samples. Psychologist Walter Mischel's 1968 book Personality and Assessment argued that behavior varies strongly with the situation, so one setting predicts another only partly.
Why do traits shift as people age?
A 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Brent Roberts, Kate Walton, and Wolfgang Viechtbauer found that people on average become more conscientious, emotionally stable, and agreeable from young adulthood through middle age. Psychologists call this the maturity principle. Researchers link the changes to new social roles, such as work and family, that reward responsibility.
Why do fast startups spin off founders?
Working at a fast-growing company teaches how a business runs, builds a network, and shows what is possible. In 1957, eight engineers later nicknamed the Traitorous Eight left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Alumni of Fairchild went on to found other chip companies, including Intel in 1968 and AMD in 1969.