Career | Alessandro Perilli

The Three Dimensions of the Good Life

peris — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 17:56:09 +0000

We present empirical evidence that happiness, meaning, and psychological richness are related but distinct and desirable aspects of a good life.

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How to Hire a CEO (According to Vinod Khosla)

peris — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:52:08 +0000

How to Hire a CEO:

1. Define the Ideal Candidate Through Real Examples

Instead of writing a spec, which generally looks like god in hard to meet form, start with a dozen top resumes that you can annotate. Highlight positive and negative experiences and characteristics to create a spec based on realistic candidates, and then hand these markups to your recruiter.

2. Choose the Right Search Firm

Smaller search firms often have a better network and instinct for entrepreneurial candidates than large firms that are used to staffing F500 companies. I have generally found that their instincts for entrepreneurial talent can be off. Smaller firms are more attuned to the needs of startups and growth-stage companies.

3. The Technical Athlete, Not the “Expert”

My bias is to find someone who hasn’t spent too much time in the industry to which the startup belongs. Some time is helpful, but too much leads to sclerosis. For example, when hiring for a medical device business, avoid candidates with too much time in medical devices. But the candidate should have experience working in complex engineering outside of medtech. The latter, coupled with deep technical expertise and just a small dose of medtech experience is likely to be more innovative and faster-moving.
There are very few areas where somebody innovated in an area where they’ve spent their life deeply entrenched. In the 40 years in which I’ve participated in disruptive innovation, I actually can’t think of one example. That’s an unusual kind of statement, and I’ve looked hard. Were space launches disrupted by Airbus, Lockheed and Boeing? No. It was SpaceX and Rocket Lab. All that activity is coming from people who weren’t in the business.

4. The Golden Goose not the Golden Egg

Prioritize finding someone who is the absolute best team builder and a good leader. That will give you the agility to navigate anything from complex engineering problems to an FDA process. A great team builder who can execute the job is more valuable than someone with narrow expertise who knows how to execute that particular job. The ability to assemble a specialized team is crucial for complex projects. And with the frequency of changing plans in a startup, someone who can constantly adapt and build for the next S-curve will pay dividends over someone whose “expertise” and “experience” handles the issue at present.
With regard to more technically complex projects, especially one that spans a multitude of different types of engineering, a CEO with a diversity of technical skill is required to make judgment calls, but again, the most valuable skill set will be in building various teams in specialized domains.

5. Growth Velocity Over Experience

When considering a first-time CEO, the most crucial factors for me are their quality of thinking and their ability to grow rapidly. It’s challenging to define this in a job specification, but I prioritize finding someone who can manage change, adapt to new situations, and build a great team over domain expertise. I prefer individuals who can quickly learn and grow, rather than those with extensive CEO experience, especially in new and evolving fields.
For example, while domain expertise is important for getting a device to FDA approval, I might prioritize someone who demonstrates rapid learning and critical thinking and who can hire the domain expert. Experience can mostly be traded off for these qualities. A candidate who is a great thinker, learner, and team builder is ideal for me. Leadership, goal setting, and understanding the technical space are key, as these are harder to learn from scratch.
I am open to giving someone a chance to grow into the role, even if they may not be the definitive long-term CEO. But they’d better be curious, a broad thinker, a first principle thinker, action oriented, a great recruiter and able to lead with vision…

6. Synthesize Diverse Information

The second important aspect is aligning the expectations of all stakeholders involved. For a company creating an artificial womb for example, stakeholders on the science, business, and impact front may include the OB-GYN, neonatologist, engineers, mother, child, and surgeon. The CEO of such a company must integrate feedback and relay it effectively to the relevant team members to both understand each of those stakeholder’s “workflows” and how the tech fits in and solves their problem. Failure to do so will result in critical requirements being omitted from the project. A CEO must gain a deep understanding of all involved constituents; integrating and addressing diverse needs is a must. In the early stages, sufficient technical/scientific background is often essential to be able to exercise judgment on hard technical/scientific choices.

7. Prioritize Effectively and Make Trade-offs Wisely

Smart individuals can quickly figure out a thorny issue if they can pare it down into its structural components, prioritize, and make decisions effectively based on the identified fulcrums. Thinking clearly and critically is often more important than experience in new technical areas.

8. Raise Funds

Even at the development stage, it’s important to find a candidate who can raise funds effectively. This ability can be crucial for sustaining and growing a company. Selling investors, employees, and partners is also a critical skill.

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Only 163 books out of 45,000 sold more than 100,000 copies

peris — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 08:03:10 +0000

There were more than 450,000 new titles issued last year according to Bookscan. A title is a book in a specific format–so the audio counts as separate from the hardcover, etc. To be conservative, you can triple the sales numbers here, to account for digital and audio formats of the same title.

If we narrow that down to the 45,000 books published by the largest publishers —books that by every definition are not self-published, and that required a team to create— we get this chart.
…
Scarcity made the book publishing world work as a business, and scarcity is gone.

Write a book because you can and because it might make a difference. But don’t listen to your publisher’s suggestions simply to sell more copies. You probably won’t.

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The person who talks the most is the most likely to become the leader

peris — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 20:52:16 +0000

The person who talks the most is the most likely to become the leader.

https://perilli.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Adam-Grant.mp4

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Create a Vacuum

peris — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:28:36 +0000

You know, I did five years of Akimbo, it was in the top 1% of all podcasts, and then I just stopped.

And I stopped not because I didn’t love it, I did love it, I stopped because if I kept doing it, there’s something else I wouldn’t do instead.

And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum.

But if I just keep doing the thing, then there is no vacuum.
…
If there’s something pending, it’s not a vacuum.

There have been times when something so good came along, I did it and then had to remove things so I could do it.
…
This is not what I’m talking about.

I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you’re never gonna work again, where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up.

And that’s hard to do.

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Leadership is about having a belief system

peris — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 22:04:26 +0000

That’s leadership. Having a belief system. Knowing what’s driving you to do what you do, not you fitting in to do career enhancement.

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Inspiration is for amateurs

peris — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:33:50 +0000

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; ... Read more

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Find who and what needs you the most

peris — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 10:21:59 +0000

No one can compete with you on being you.

Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

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This idea of a meritocracy that every organization sells is really just a myth

peris — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:28:58 +0000

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Why would anybody want to listen to what you have to say?

peris — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 09:45:34 +0000

because you help them
because you entertain them
because you make them hopeful and/or enthusiastic
(maybe) because you say things they would like to say but cannot say

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