Isn't it true that teams do get hired all the time, just not all at once? I.e., a top person is hired to lead a particular department; there's a bit of housecleaning, and then over the next year or two, that top person coincidentally ends up hiring several former teammates from other organizations. End result: A reconstitution of an old team, just over a longer timeframe.
Yes it does. I mention this re sales teams here, where it's more common. But the overall impact/ effort is still weighted towards multiple individual hires. And it still doesn't happen often enough ..
When the Traitorous Eight left Shockley, they looked for a company that would hire them all at once, and Fairchild was pretty close to that—they raised outside funds and got stock, but it was incubated by a corporate parent.
It is an interesting question. Maybe companies rather than teams of coworkers are a good division of labor; a team works well if different people have complementary strengths (all good at some of the same things, so they can work together, but also good at *different* things so there's nonlinear scaling). In some teams it seems like one person's default job is to interface with the outside world, either raising money or doing sales, and the natural way for one person to negotiate a group hire is for that person to negotiate an acquihire of a company.
I find the boundaries we draw interesting here. We prefer as individuals, product-teams, or companies, as abstraction layers, but rarely as co-working pairs, or multi-team combines. The exception is in starting companies, which counterintuitively is also the *hardest* part. Status quo is the anti-Entrepreneur First ...
I also find the lack of supply here fascinating - we don't even think of working together as an option, unless its starting s'thing!
This is one of my favorite posts of all time! It's a tough nut to crack, but I think it's doable. I wish Stripe had allowed people to submit two resumes at once, and limited it to two people, and interviewed them together.
See also Alexey Guzey's post on how to fix science, where he points out that university labs are run by individuals (PIs), never teams. Imagine how much more we could accomplish.
Isn't it true that teams do get hired all the time, just not all at once? I.e., a top person is hired to lead a particular department; there's a bit of housecleaning, and then over the next year or two, that top person coincidentally ends up hiring several former teammates from other organizations. End result: A reconstitution of an old team, just over a longer timeframe.
Yes it does. I mention this re sales teams here, where it's more common. But the overall impact/ effort is still weighted towards multiple individual hires. And it still doesn't happen often enough ..
When the Traitorous Eight left Shockley, they looked for a company that would hire them all at once, and Fairchild was pretty close to that—they raised outside funds and got stock, but it was incubated by a corporate parent.
It is an interesting question. Maybe companies rather than teams of coworkers are a good division of labor; a team works well if different people have complementary strengths (all good at some of the same things, so they can work together, but also good at *different* things so there's nonlinear scaling). In some teams it seems like one person's default job is to interface with the outside world, either raising money or doing sales, and the natural way for one person to negotiate a group hire is for that person to negotiate an acquihire of a company.
I find the boundaries we draw interesting here. We prefer as individuals, product-teams, or companies, as abstraction layers, but rarely as co-working pairs, or multi-team combines. The exception is in starting companies, which counterintuitively is also the *hardest* part. Status quo is the anti-Entrepreneur First ...
I also find the lack of supply here fascinating - we don't even think of working together as an option, unless its starting s'thing!
This is one of my favorite posts of all time! It's a tough nut to crack, but I think it's doable. I wish Stripe had allowed people to submit two resumes at once, and limited it to two people, and interviewed them together.
See also Alexey Guzey's post on how to fix science, where he points out that university labs are run by individuals (PIs), never teams. Imagine how much more we could accomplish.
Another legendary pair: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu. Arnold has preached the importance of lifting partners for succeeding in bodybuilding. https://medium.com/@Schwarzenegger/my-best-friend-6c3fca83e5b3