Unpopular Hiring Opinion: Don't Hire for Past Expertise

I watched this great interview of Aravind Srinivas, CEO and Cofounder of Perplexity, at Stanford GSB. There's a segment here, where he talks about hiring individuals who may not be experts yet but possess resilience and a willingness to experiment, thereby encouraging a dynamic and innovative workforce ready to tackle challenges head-on. In contrast, if you've solved a problem once, you'll be less hungry to solve it again.

That really got me thinking about some of the biggest problems in tech in recent history solved by industry outsiders.

1. Jeff Wilke built Amazon Fulfilment network without prior retail or distribution experience, coming from a background in chemical engineering, management consulting and manufacturing at Honeywell

2. Sergio Monsalve, Susan Wojcicki and Larry Page built Google AdWords and transformed the online ads through efficient targeting despite little to no prior experience in advertising.

3. Sam Altman, though he came from YC and tech ecosystem, made AGI popular through OpenAI first vs. tech stalwarts working at Google or Meta for years in AI

On the other hand, I could think of many examples at the top of my mind where "expert" leaders floundered - such as Marissa Mayer, a veteran Google executive failed in reviving Yahoo or Owen Van Natta, previously COO at Facebook who was brought in to revitalize MySpace in 2009. Even George Fisher, CEO of Kodak brought in from Motorola, failed to create change at Kodak such that it missed the digital imaging wave despite his similar successes at Motorola.

Sure, the list of leaders may be biased to prove the point.

But it is quite rational that just because you did it once, doesn't mean you will do it again. The context is different, there's arrogance from 'expertise' that comes in play and the 'hunger' to solving it for the very first time and taking bold approaches is explainably lesser the second time around.