Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google | Blitzscaling 08

The way you build great products is by building a small team, working really hard, pushing the team & getting the product out which just barely works. 

Example: The original iPod just barely worked initially. From there, Apple improved it before it was taken to the mass market. As a founder, you have to have a judgment when your product & start-up is ready to scale.

Great products are built from self-use. As a founder, you know whether your product really works or not. And if you don’t know, get the data from your initial set of customers and analyze it. Making sure your product works before you take VC money and start expanding in all directions.

• Hire intelligence over experience.
• Take your time to hire the right guys. And if things are not working with new hires even after doing multiple interventions, fire them fast.
• Sell your dream to prospective candidates. Hire those to whom it makes sense. .
• Hire ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.
• Hire people who can work better in teams. Give a person an exception to be an individual contributor if she is an exceptional talent.
• On the finance side, hire CFOs who have gone bankrupt because they have seen what should not be done to become bankrupt.

Next generation of successful programmers will be those who can write programs such that software themselves can learn how to solve a problem. This is also called machine learning.

In every successful company, you have got a core team with following qualities:

• The one who has very good product sense.
• The one who has emotional intelligence for all the stakeholders.
• And the one who knows who to make people move fast.

Three pointers for entrepreneurs who want to build a great company:

• Have an incredible founding team & right founders to address right kind of problem
• You need to have some luck
• Passion, lots of hard work and hiring awesome people