Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I am Ben Horowitz and I am here with Shannon Callahan,

and we are going to talk about human resources. Shannon, in working with startup companies,

what's the biggest mistake that you see companies make with respect to HR?

I would say the biggest mistake I am seeing is that they're not bringing it on soon enough.

A lot of our CEOs and founders feel that once they've hired the recruiter, they've kind of

covered themselves on the HR front.

That's interesting because recruiters are kind of the opposite of HR.

To some degree, yes.

Yes.

So you and I have talked about this in the past, but recruiters from a personality standpoint,

to be a world-class recruiter, you have to be kind of a world-class salesperson.

And generally, world-class salespeople tend to have a fairly self-centric view of the world,

like that's what makes them good. Uh, and, you know, that kind of charisma and attitude.

And HR, on the other hand, is like the opposite. It's, when done well, it's a kind of very low

profile, um, kind of thankless job, but very important job. And it's unusual that a

recruiter would become like a great head of HR, yes. Yes. And I think that the other mistake that,

it's not a mistake, but I think where they're going down the wrong path is there are tons and tons of

recruiters that want to take on HR, which means that they're going down the wrong path is there are tons and tons of recruiters

that want to take on HR, which means that they're either not hiring the best recruiter who wants

to go out and hunt and make the kill to build an incredible technical team, or they're putting

someone who has that skill set in charge of HR. So both are a disconnect.

Right. But recruiters are pretty good at selling CEOs on the fact that they should be head of HR. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

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