Privilege and positional advantage

And why we committed dozens of extra hours and resources to fill one position

The startup world is filled with adages such as “A players hire A players, and B players hire C players”, or “hire the person who already did that job before so you don’t have to worry”. Most pitch decks are filled with a barrage of logos of successful companies and top universities. Sometimes more blatantly, job descriptions have outright statements as “IIT/IIM or ivy league graduates only”, and even worse, some roles get hired even without a public job positing where others could apply. All of these are symptoms of underlying beliefs that conflate brands with competence.

This used to bother me a lot. It bothered me emotionally because I’ve been a non-traditional candidate for every role I aspired for - except for my current role at GGV - and hustled to get in. It bothers me even after I try to adjust for my emotional biases because privilege compounds from the day you are born. Warren Buffet elegantly summarizes it as the Ovarian lottery. Simply put, it’s very likely that where you are born plays a big role even decades later on whether or not you get that job. Primarily because privilege compounds into positional advantage from the neighborhood you’re born in, the school you go to, hobbies you pick up, colleges you get admitted to, the first job you get, social networks you are in, and the mentorship you get to make the right career choices. It also leads to a compounding disadvantage if you’re a minority in terms of race, gender, caste, able-bodiedness, sexuality, etc.,

In essence, creating an imaginary and guarded wall of positional advantage around the garden of most coveted and accelerated career paths.

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I made peace with this only at Stanford where I found a rational and empathetic viewpoint for why the system works like this. In particular, from an application of The Lemons theory (which made 3 professors win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001) to people management and career planning. Here’s my paraphrasing/ internalized version: You can not assess with 100% certainty whether a person is right for the job, nor can you randomly hire one of the applicants. Furthermore, if you offer the median salary for above-average candidates, none of them will accept the role; and if you offer the median salary for below-average candidates, then you’re overpaying for a weak candidate. Hence, the paper argues that the best way to solve this is by narrowing the band in this normal curve of candidates. Similar to how Kelly Blue Book does bands for cars. In this narrow band, you have a manageable number of people to assess and you can pay a base salary that’s the center of this band but offer good variable compensation based on performance to make the above-average candidates accept.

However, the essential question remains on how to narrow that band to shortlist people for a role. That’s where it hit home for me. (Again paraphrasing an internalized version, and not necessarily that of my professors/school), most traditional HR divisions (emphasis on most and traditional, not all) are bad at assessing people. This is because of a historical and systemic underappreciation and under-investment in HR - monetary, social, and otherwise. This is why the economy came with hacks to narrow these bands. Feeder schools, clubs, universities, entry-level “prep careers” such as consulting/banking/big tech, etc., The new-age brands such as “ex-Uber” or “ex-Flipkart” are a variant of this because of the assumption that candidates got trained by exceptional people/circumstances.

One of the professors goes so far as to say that the primary role of a university is not to teach but to narrow these bands for employers; and that the admissions office is the most important division - as it determines the prospects for its students and alumni, and it is the “outsourced” hiring org for employers.

Furthermore, as a startup leader, you’re also unlikely to get the top band of “discovered” talent. So, the key task for a good founder is to come up with a discovery and management process for talent, that’s not heavily reliant on brands. Great founders go a step further by setting up a top-notch HR team that is shown respect through status, actual influence, and compensation. History is filled with victories of small teams of motivated, coordinated, and committed people winning over large groups of competent but uncoordinated and egotistic people. e.g., Great companies such as Qualtrics and Freshworks are built outside the traditional tech hubs and with exceptional folks without brands next to their names.

Initiatives in this realm range from respecting and building a kick-ass talent team (often separating recruiting and people ops), narrowing the bands based on skills (assessed using technology/work samples, and not on labels)¹, and taking a chance on people by being mindful of our biases. (Sidebar: This is why more than half of GGV’s founder portal content is on hiring, managing, and promoting people; and the biggest priority for our portfolio services teams; Also why we encourage our founders at a board level to build a kickass recruiting and people ops team).

The startup HR class at Stanford ends with an appeal to our hearts that true leadership is not embracing the system we came up in but making it better for future generations to flourish fairly. Now you can see why I drink the Stanford kool-aid so much.

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So, why is this relevant now?

It’s because we are hiring an analyst for our team, and it is one of the best stepping stones for anyone with aspirations to be a founder or VC in India/the US. When I spoke to other VC firms on how they hired, most of them hired through search firms and these search firms already have a list of 200-300 candidates who went to Ivy league/IIT/ BITS and worked at MBB firms, top banks, or top startups. All we had to do is give the search firms the JD and they will give us a shortlist of 30-40 candidates for our funnel. It hit me hard because I would have never made it to those secret shortlists had Hans and GGV followed the same process, not kept the process open, and actively searched for non-traditional candidates. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I think I do fine in my career and so do other kickass “non-traditional” peers in the industry.

It feels like this is my “game-time”. It is only for one role, but it’s one of those moments where an unfair process could compound privilege or level it for that one person. I am also a member of the firm’s internal and portfolio diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives team - championed by my boss Hans. Among our Sandhill road peers, we are arguably one of the most vocal proponents, investors, and donors for DEI. Some of our initiatives: donations, investments, board diversity, and early career efforts. Furthermore, most of my colleagues are a minority in one way or the other but with a superpower, and we pride ourselves in being a diverse team that learns from each other and builds on each other’s strengths. It is also one of those roles where we could do a public, non-confidential search². Hence, it’s even more pertinent for us to do this process very intentionally.

So, we decided to do it by “systemizing” some of the hacks that worked for me and some of my colleagues to break into the industry despite being non-traditional candidates. The three ecosystem pre-conditions that worked for us: 1.) Awareness of the role; 2.) Openness by the employer to consider sample work (pitch memos; small angel investments, or advisory work) or equivalencies (tier 2 bank but exceptional rating and modeling skills/ startup work experience but in the IR function); and 3.) Willingness to reconsider their shortlist rejections and add people to the funnel.

These three approaches worked because people love working with an underdo who is hungry, hustling, and humble!

We systemized these three elements by launching the role publicly (the JD post is read by 43K people in a week; 250+ applications), designing a process that’s fair at every stage of filtering (clear guidelines to the search team to ensure fairness and judging criteria), and created fail-safes at every step of the process (rejections followed with an escalation option to re-evaluate). This process is going to cost us more than we budgeted, and we are spending dozens of extra hours to screen.

Some examples of process hacks we added:

In the JD:

In regret emails:

We aren’t sure whether the outcome would be different from what we would have, had we gone with the shortlist the search firms offered. But we want to do the right thing by making the process accessible and fair, and that we got the best colleague for ourselves who we are going to spend hundreds of hours of our lives with and put our trust in.

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It’s still Day 1 for me, and I have a long way to go. I do have a ton of biases, and I am now privileged in some ways too (I am relatively underprivileged in many aspects vs. my peers, e.g., as a self-made, first-gen college grad, from a remote village in India. But I am also a male who’s born in one of the fastest developing regions in India; I went to IIT and Stanford, and I now work at one of the top VC firms in the world). Hence, I am committed to being aware of my own evolving and compounding privilege, and I am willing to do what I could to make the system fairer and better.

Lastly, if you know some great candidates, do ask them to check this out and apply - link

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Epilogue to the last post on the costs to consistency: I haven’t heard many opposing views on the post yet. It could be because my network (and current readers) are predominantly those who moved a lot in life. However, I did get some good reinforcing comments from several friends and good resources - link (special s/o to Rajiv Tarigopula who pointed me to read this on choice supportive biases; do check out the references section if you’re keen to nerd out more).

Reminder: As feared, the UN has now declared a state of famine in Tigray. If you can, please donate to WFP’s efforts in the region.

1. I acknowledge that it’s not possible to assess in this fashion as the role becomes senior. But what matters is the intent and the culture of assessment based on competence instead of labels. i.e., Amazon with the required essays

2. Having said that, even for confidential searches, my colleagues in the internal talent and external portfolio services teams are quite intentional about pipeline diversity. e.g., a majority of board seats we helped place at portfolio companies are those from minority backgrounds.