Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media wrote an excellent article titled How I Failed. It’s a humble title but it does reveal some issues that he ran into when starting his company. I’ve seen other entrepreneurs make the same mistakes he has and some people don’t make it while others do. O’Reilly looks into six things he learned and ways to deal with his failure points.
Failure #5: Hiring supplements, not complements
Another of the things I wish I’d done earlier was to hire people who were good at things I wasn’t. As a founder, you often seem to be the best at everything — the best product designer, the best marketer, the best sales person. Sometimes that’s really true, but often it’s just because you hire people who aren’t as good as you are at the things you’re good at, and don’t hire people who are better than you are at the things you don’t do so well. You hire supplements to do more of what you already do, rather than people who really complement your skills.