Find Your People

What Sam is optimizing for in his career: spending all of his time with amazing people, get leverage on seeing what's around the bend, somewhere where patience and temperament are rewarded, build an ecosystem where trust is compounded, build fewer deeper relationships

The way I think about coaching is very much how I think about parenting, and I think it translates in lots of other places, that your ability to drive change is about the quality of your relationship, not your hierarchy.

I think I care about the value of recruiting more than almost anyone I know. I think getting in amazing people at the start, in the middle, at the end, all the way through, having an ever-raising bar that someone has to clear, it's not quite everything, but often it's close.

I'm a deep believer that people are power law too, whether you're running a small company or whether you're running a big company, your ability to attract the best in the world I think is so incredible.

You're among the very best in the world, and can't believe it. You're worried someone else out there is better, and you're underplaying your skills, not overplaying them, and you're constantly looking for new edges, because you presume there just must be someone out there that's even better.

You don't have to be the smartest person in the group at all, maybe not even the most talented. But you have to have a way in which you can bring all these people together. I do think you're going to need some really, really, really pointy skill that you can lean into.

Personally, I'm often looking for people who are quite pointy in one way or another, who are really unusual at one item here or there, and are cognizant of their weaknesses. And then the ones I really like are often open about their weaknesses and are keeping them their weaknesses, because they think it's an infinite game that you don't quite under... See more

What Sam looks for in founders: breadcrumbs from their past that hint at their trajectory, outsiders with a unique insight, unusually strong in one area, cognizant of their weaknesses, understand where they need to focus right now, have a way to inspire and bring people together

Sam looks for digital breadcrumbs from someone's past that hint at their trajectory: "And so to the extent people have written blogs or posted things on Twitter or created some artifact that I think of that they've sort of buried in time that I can go find, that's often amazing, because you get a chance to see people over a long period of time."