Founders cannot outsource hiring.
"Hiring is paramount because you need creativity; you need ambitious people. Ideally, early hires are geniuses. They are self-managing, humble, hardworking, highly capable, creative, and technically proficient—perhaps you also need one or two salespeople—but you can't do everything yourself, nor can you manage every single detail."
Early hires are the company's DNA. It's a sad day when you outsource hiring, letting others recruit, interview, and make hiring decisions without your direct involvement or veto power. On that day, the company is no longer directly under your control.
Now, there's an extra "thread of control." The hiring process is conducted by someone else, often remotely. This other person doesn't have the same screening power as you, as the founder.
The key size at which a company begins to undergo significant change isn't some arbitrary number, like 20, 30, or 40 people. It's when the founder no longer directly hires and manages everyone. One key point. Once a company has a middle management level, you become disconnected from the company, and your ability to directly lead the product team and guide the company from scratch disappears.
Therefore, we really can't outsource recruitment. People might think they can, for example, they'll hire recruiters. Perhaps you could outsource some recruitment channels, but I think that's very difficult. There are many reasons why recruitment is so important—many of which are obvious, so I won't elaborate—but one less obvious reason is that the best people only want to work with the best people.
Working with people less capable than themselves creates a cognitive burden for them. The more people around them who are less capable than themselves, the more they feel they don't belong there. Or that they should just do their own thing.
The best teams are mutually motivating. They push each other forward. Everyone wants to impress the others.
A good way to test this is when you're recruiting new people, you can tell them: "Walk into the room where the rest of the team is. Pick someone randomly—pull them aside and interview them for 30 minutes. If you don't impress them, don't join."
When you conduct this test...