Naval's advice on building an early startup team, traits that make for the best founders, and an inspirational Brian Chesky tweet

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Naval’s advice on team building

“Founders can delegate everything except recruiting, fundraising, strategy, and product vision.

Recruiting is the most important thing because you need creativity, you need motivated people.

Ideally, the early people are all geniuses. They're self-managing, low ego, hardworking, highly competent builders, technical, maybe one or two sellers — but you can't watch everything, you can't micromanage everything. The early people are the DNA of the company.

When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement in veto, that's a sad day.

That's the day that the company's no longer being driven directly by you.

There's now a fly by wire element in between, there's some mechanical linkage going through another human, often at a distance, and other people are not going to have the same level of selectivity that you will as founder.

The important size at which a company starts changing is not some arbitrary number like 20 or 30 or 40. It's the point at which the founder is not directly recruiting and managing everyone.

The moment that there are middle layers of management then you are somewhat disconnected from the company and your ability to directly drive a product team that can take the company from 0 to 1 goes away.“

Source: Curate People by Naval

2: Elad Gil on what makes the best founders

Elad Gil is a highly accomplish technology investor who has backed Airbnb, Airtable, Coinbase, Figma, Flexport, Instacart, Notion, Square, Stripe and more.

“I used to do this thing when I'd meet people, I sometimes almost think of their life as like a Monte Carlo simulation.

If I reran their life, if you ran their life a billion times, what's the expected outcome?

What's the average expected outcome?

For some people, you meet them and you're like, "Oh my gosh, this person is amazing. Like their average outcome is going to be up here.

And for other people, you're like, "Wow, this person got lucky." They're not that good.

The best founders tend to be very smart, very driven, very aggressive, want to win, and have a relentless work ethic.

They tend to be very smart, very strategic, able to motivate people extremely well.

They read people very well.

Whether they care about how the person's feeling in the moment may matter less or more, but they can read people very well and they know how to motivate them and poke them.“

Source: Elad Gil: Is the AI Bubble Real? by Molly O’Shea

3: An inspirational Brian Chesky tweet

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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