Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And I'm here today with Jeff Stump and Giacinto,

who are from our executive talent team, which means, and I'll let you guys explain what it means,

but my understanding is you guys know everything about building teams at the executive level.

And so we're here to talk about that today. Welcome, guys. Thank you for having us.

I hear you guys talk about this a lot and others.

And one of the things that startups always grapple with is this kind of notion of fit.

We're going to hire somebody.

We're going to bring them into our little family.

We want to make sure that they're going to be a good member of the family.

But how important is fit?

And then I want to get into how, like, is there a method and a process for something that's so

squishy? Yeah. No, there's definitely a method to the madness. And, you know, fit,

fit means many things. Fit. There's fit around the role, right? And can this person be effective and, um,

uh, have success in the role? And then there's, there's fit when people talk about fit around

culture. Right. And so two different, two totally different things to evaluate for two,

uh, just very different dimensions and a candidate.

And so if you're a young company, how should you go about, I guess, analyzing for it?

Before I mentioned, there's kind of like, at the highest level, there's two dimensions,

there's the cultural fit, and then there's the position and role fit.

I generally believe there's like, there's in the role category, there's, there's expectations, right,

that have to be aligned. There's a certain alignment of motivations. And then the byproduct of those two things is really fit.

So to go a little bit further, for example, you hire VPS sales.

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