Thomas A. Edison 

One resolution I’ve made for 2012 is to take a strong stance on more issues. I’ve always felt some people are too opinionated about things they don’t know enough about, which probably made me overcompensate and not form strong opinions to share. Some friends have pointed out that even when I know a lot about things, I often times don’t take a strong position about them. Instead, I comprehensively recite both sides of an issue, but I don’t pick a side for things like:

•  Is this startup idea good?
•  Which design looks better?
•  Who deserves more from a partnership?

I used to think the easiest think to do is to have a strong opinion while the harder part was having a true understanding of both sides. However, a good friend recently shared the following with me, which completely changed my perspective:

Strong opinions are important because you need to believe in something to guide your decisions in order to accomplish anything. It’s the difference between being an author and a book reviewer. The author has to decide what is important and what should be cut and what the point of the book is. Every word that is in the book is there because the author decided it should be there. The book reviewer can read a book and comment on the decisions that were made by the author, but he will never be able to write a book because he can not make the important decisions, he can only comment on the decisions others have made.

Being well rounded and understanding that both sides of an argument have pros and cons is easy. It’s moving past that and making a decision that is hard. As an entrepreneur by definition you can’t be content to accept both sides of the coin and sit idly by. You have to consider both, and then fully commit to one. Strong opinions lead to vision because only when you have made a decision about what is important and what is right can you start to see how the future should be.

So maybe by having stronger opinions this year, I’ll have a better sense of what’s coming the following years. That seems worth trying for at least.

I wrote an answer to this question on Quora. There are few things more interesting to me than the intersection of behavioral economics and startups.

T.E. Lawrence

Reading the biography of Amazon.com’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, I came across this quote on hiring:

“One of [Jeff’s] mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she would raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving,” said Nicholas Lovejoy, who joined Amazon in 1995 as the fifth employee. Bezos put the philosophy this way: Five years after an employee was hired, he said, that employee should think, “I’m glad that I got hired when I did, because I wouldn’t get hired now.”

I thought this is a terrific approach to hiring. At first, it seemed to conflict with some common advice about hiring only A-players. How could you hire better people in the future if you already were hiring the best?

I realized the way to reconcile these bits of advice is that there are A-players for different stages of the company and also some A-players who can scale across stages. Hiring people who will do a great job at the current scale and have the potential to punch above their weight class can still leave room for “even better” future hires who come from even larger scale organizations where they succeeded. In spite of how far I’ve taken my company, PaperG, from its inception, I am still in awe of outside executives interested in working with us who have far more experience and success to date from their times operating much larger companies. 

PaperG is in the midst of a mini-hiring spree (expanding the team by about 20% in a month) to help us as we scale the business to enable some of the largest media companies go after one of the most exciting markets, local advertising. In some open positions, we just need to compare whether the new hire is much better than someone already in a similar position.

In other open positions, we have to think whether the new hire will be doing a better job than a founder could if he did it full-time. It’s a high bar —  but even founders should want to feel lucky they were the ones to start the company and not be the ones who are applying for the competitive position. 

Steve Jobs