There are many aspects to hiring great people, and various people smarter than me have written extensively on the topic.
So I'm not going to try to be comprehensive.
But I am going to relay some lessons learned through hard experience on how to hire the best people you've ever worked with -- particularly for a startup.
I'm going to cover two key areas in this post:
Lots of people will tell you to hire for intelligence.
Especially in this industry.
You will read, hire the smartest people out there and your company's success is all but guaranteed.
I think intelligence, per se, is highly overrated.
Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success.
Now, clearly you don't want to hire dumb people, and clearly you'd like to work with smart people.
But let's get specific.
Most of the lore in our industry about the role of intelligence in company success comes from two stratospherically successful companies -- Microsoft, and now Google -- that are famous for hiring for intelligence.
Microsoft's metric for intelligence was the ability to solve logic puzzles.
(I don't know if the new, MBA-heavy Microsoft still does this, but I do know this is how Microsoft in its heyday worked.)
For example, a classic Microsoft interview question was: "Why is a manhole cover round?"
The right answer, of course, is, "Who cares? Are we in the manhole business?"
(Followed by twisting in your chair to look all around, getting up, and leaving.)