Ben Horowitz holds the contrarian view that CEOs cannot truly 'develop' their executives. Executives either possess the skills and autonomy to do the job or they don't. The CEO's primary role in team-building is to hire people who are already capable, not to coach them into the role.

Conventional hiring—opening a role and then searching—is inefficient. Chesky advocates for 'pipeline recruiting,' a continuous process of meeting the best people in a field, asking them for introductions to other top talent, and building a deep rolodex long before a specific need arises.

When you're a new leader or a small company, A-players vet the entire executive team, not just you. Make recruiting a team sport by including the CEO and CFO. This demonstrates the company's collective strength and convinces candidates to join the mission, not just the manager.

To scale from 100 to 1,000+ employees, you must stop interviewing everyone. Success depends entirely on the cultural foundation built with the first 100 people. By personally hiring and imbuing them with the company's core values, you create a group of leaders who can replicate that culture as the organization expands.

CEOs leading companies over 100 employees dedicate up to half their time to recruiting their executive team. Their primary concern becomes building the leadership layer and designing the organization, a significant shift from the focus of CEOs at smaller companies.

Unlike a functional manager who can develop junior talent, a CEO lacks the domain expertise to coach their entire executive team (e.g., CFO, VP of HR). A CEO's time is better spent hiring world-class leaders who provide 'managerial leverage' by bringing new ideas and driving their function forward, rather than trying to fix people in roles they've never done.

At Larroudé, the executive culture is "hands-on." Leaders are not just strategists who delegate; they must be able to execute tasks themselves. Furthermore, a critical hiring criterion for leadership is the ability to recruit, with the expectation that they can build out their own high-performing teams.

The definition of a top-tier hire isn't just about skills, but also the confidence to operate autonomously and make decisions as if they were the CEO of their domain. The goal is to build a team of empowered leaders you can unleash, not a team of employees you need to constantly manage.

Gaurav Kapadia uses chef David Chang's model: hire for 'good enough' credentials plus a 'special something' like extra curiosity or ingenuity. Crucially, he argues this high bar must apply to all staff, including operations and support, to create a pervasive culture of excellence and dynamism, avoiding a common organizational mistake.