Tuesday I wrote that you should always consider the source of a comment before considering the comment itself.

The same day Serguei Beloussov, founder of Parallels and Runa Capital, said the same thing with regard to money sources in TechCrunch.

By viewing money as the most important thing for their business, startups often bring themselves into a corner.  Entrepreneurs must place a premium on the quality of the investor(s) and understand why a smaller amount of money can serve companies better, in most cases, than big money with little or no relevant business expertise.

Sources also matter when it comes to the skills you need in your startup.

When a badly needed set of skills walks through the door managers and even team members will often turn a blind eye to the possessor of those skills.

The red flags that pop up during interviews are rationalized or ignored—even when they are waving madly in a high wind—a ‘get the skills and we’ll worry about the rest later’ attitude prevails.

The problem, of course, is that ‘later’ comes very quickly, often with weeks and sometimes just days.

At that point, you are faced with the choice of keeping the person and having your team damaged or even torn asunder or terminating her and starting your search over.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re evaluating comments or money or skills it’s the source that counts.

Or put another way (paraphrasing), it’s the people, stupid.

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Flickr image credit: Hartwig HKD

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2012 at 1:15 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs, Hiring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: authenticity, hiring mistakes, hiring process, skills
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