“our first outside hire in the US—she was the head of children's summer camps... if you can deal with coordinating a bunch of screaming kids and 20 to 30 angry parents every week, you can do this job”

Hire for Transferable Grit, Not Exact Prior Experience

When Ian needed his first US-based sales hire, he passed on candidates with traditional backgrounds and chose someone whose prior chaos-management skills mapped directly to the demands of the role. This same logic shaped how he hired overseas EAs — selecting for operational intelligence and trainability over prior EA experience. Shipping a services business fast means finding people who can handle the real underlying stress of the job, whatever title they previously held.