Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, has an advice for companies: hire only when you face acute operational pain not because you think you need someone in the future. Tan said that he has learned from both venture capitalists and founders that hiring during operational stress will help companies better define roles and avoid mismatched hires. “Hire out of pain. Don’t hire because you think you’ll need someone soon or maybe sometime later. Wait until you or your team are actually hurting: working weekends, missing family dinners, dropping balls. That pain is the signal that the role is real,” he said.Tan said that he he “learned this the hard way after watching founders (including myself) hire ahead of need and end up with people in roles that weren’t fully formed yet”.
Why Garry Tan wants founders to ‘hire out of pain’
According to Tan, the right time to post a job is when the current team is reaching a breaking point which makes the hiring process successful because the new hire will know you’ll back them up. “When you hire out of pain, you know exactly what the job is because you’ve been doing it yourself. You can evaluate performance because you know what good looks like. And the new hire knows you’ll step back in if they fail, because you were just doing it last week,” he pointed out.
Garry Tan’s warning to students
Last year, Tan warned engineering and business college students, criticising unnamed university entrepreneurship courses. He suggested that they may be fostering an environment where students feel encouraged to bend the truth in their pursuit of startup success. Garry Tan referenced tech founders Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) and Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), both convicted for fraud and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. He warned the students that who follow the same path of exaggerating traction, misleading investors, or fabricating product capabilities they have the risk of ending in jail.
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