Typical first-time CEO mistake is to hire people who you're friends with. I love my friends. I've known most of my closest friends since first grade. But I would not hire any of them for a startup unless they were truly exceptional at the jobs we needed them for.

I didn't hire my friends at the start of my career, but did hire literally the very first people who even showed interest in working with us, simply because I'd never hired before and no one coached me on how to actually run a hiring process. Sometimes we got lucky with a star...

But most companies end up with a monoculture of people who all look and think the same, not because the CEO is a bad person, but because they don't know just how much they don't know and it ends up putting a ceiling on long-term outcomes.

Expect to see VC firms starting to put MUCH more emphasis on people & culture expertise from Day 1. The ROI is massive if you get it more right than wrong.

Wow, this has really blown up on VC twitter... here's my soundcloud lol circa 2013 https://soundcloud.com/alexisohanian 

Also please pay attention to what's happening in #Artsakh #StopAzerbaijaniAggression https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/nagorno-karabakh-and-turkeys-imperial-ambitions/