Hiring Practices (CEO-Level)

The old adage, but Halligan emphasizes *why* it's especially critical at scale: a bad hire at 50 people is painful; a bad hire at 500 people cascades. Once you know someone isn't working out, move quickly — delaying damages the team, the company, and even the person being let go.

Where it is argued

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01CEO Craft, Spiky Teams, and EV>TV>MeBrian Halligan, who led HubSpot for nearly 20 years and now coaches fast-growth CEOs at Sequoia, unpacks what it takes to be a successful CEO in the AI era. He argues that starting a company has never been easier, but scaling one into a durable organization has never been harder — AI accelerates everything, competition is exploding, and CEOs must be faster, better decision-makers than ever before. The conversation covers his “LOCK+S” algorithm for evaluating founders, why hiring is the CEO's real job at the “adults table” (and why everyone is bad at it), the EV > TV > Me framework for preventing silos at scale, how to shift from employee-centric to customer-centric culture, and the near-fatal snowmobile accident that clarified his decision to step down. Throughout, Halligan shows why he's earned the label of “student of the job of a CEO” — the episode is dense with actionable frameworks for anyone building or scaling a company.