One Question Friday: Hiring Your First Employee

Interviews suck because interviews are like first dates. It's just two people looking at each other in the face and lying to each other. You're both trying to pretend you're perfect ... In reality, we both know that that's not true; you're two imperfect people trying to make a match.

If you have less than 10 engineers, I personally do not believe you should be hiring a PM, because you're basically delegating the most important thing, which is figuring out what customers want, building it, testing it with those customers, and then that feedback loop. And no one's going to care and no one's going to be as good at that as you are as the founder at the early stages.

The Shaun Ellis question is you survey all your users, and you say 'If you could no longer use this product, would you feel not disappointed, somewhat disappointed, or very disappointed?' He says, if 40% of people say very disappointed, bang—you've got product-market fit.

Your job as the CEO of a startup is to first figure out how to make a product that customers want, and then fire yourself out of the process of making that thing.

Marc Andreessen has a quote—something like, 'Product-market fit is like having sex; if you don't know if you have it, you're not having it.' Something like that; I love that one.

Typically, you don't hire a PM as your first major hire, because you as the CEO or as the head of product or whatever, you're the one doing it ... Product managers are meant to manage larger fleets of engineers.