Learning to fire is way more important than hiring, according to Uri Levine, a two-time unicorn builder with Waze & Moovit and author of "Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution."
Speaking on the latest edition of DisrupTV, Levine outlined how it's critical for entrepreneurs to bring the right people into an organization. "Firing is more important. Hiring is the easy decision, and you have to learn how to make hard decisions," said Levine.
When Levine talked to entrepreneurs about why teams weren't performing, he would hear communication, performance, and ego management issues. "When I asked, 'when did you know the team was not right, all of them said within the first month," explained Levine. "So, they knew within the first month that the team was not right and didn't do anything. The problem is that you weren't making the hard decision. If you're not making those decisions two things happen. No. 1 is you're stuck with people that shouldn't be there. The other is even worse in that the top performing people leave because they don't want to be in an organization that is unable to make the hard decisions."
Levine added that if a startup has two choices of hiring someone awesome or firing an underperformer it's more important to fire.
"If you hire a new person mark your calendars for 30 days down the road and ask yourself one question: 'Knowing what I know today would I hire this person?' If the answer is no, then fire them immediately because they're not going to be successful. If the answer is yes, tell that person they are exceeding your expectations and give them more options or equity."
Other takeaways from Levine:
- Entrepreneurship is about value creation. Levine said when he had an idea as a child, his dad would always ask why. The question was meant to focus Levine on solving a problem.
- Startups are about the roller coaster. "This journey is going to be very challenging. This is going to be a long roller coaster of failures and each of them is important," said Levine. "If you tell me all the businesses in the world have ups and downs I'd agree, but the frequency of those are way higher when you're building startups."
- Failures matter. Given the entrepreneurship journey and frequent failures it's critical you learn from them. "It's a journey of failures so we try one thing and then another," he said. "If you're afraid to fail you already failed. You need to teach your kids to fail."
- Keep going. The sooner an entrepreneur knows it's a journey of failures, she has to fail fast. "When you fail fast you still have plenty of time to make another attempt and try different things until you find one thing that does work. If you have more attempts than anyone else you are way more likely to be successful," said Levine.