The Challenge of Staffing the Team

Clearly, you’ve got all of these ventures going. You need to have really amazing people for each one of them. Do you have a pool of people that you just keep pulling in off the bench for each one of these new projects or do you re-staff each one very specifically? Mir Imran: I think it is the latter. I have had several times people who have gone into one company, and seven or eight years later, that company is sold and whatnot. They've come back and gone to another company. But most of the time, I put a team together for that project, and I tell you, that's the hardest thing to do. Interviewer: Is that the hardest part? What are you looking for when you're looking for people? Is it looking for pure technical skills? Are you looking for complementary skills? What are you looking for? Mir Imran: I first parse the problem, the project. Generally, it's a development project, and you parse it into its mechanical engineering, material, science, if it has all those elements, or in some cases, biology and chemistry. You look at all these things and figure out what skill sets you need and try and find those. You cannot find the exact skill sets you're looking for. So what I usually do is I find somebody who is really good. I'll hire them and then modify my plan of hiring the other people. So it's a very dynamic process. Sometimes, I find some really brilliant people, and I say, "I really want to start a company around this person." Interviewer: Have you done that? Mir Imran: I've done that once, actually. Interviewer: Tell us the story. You found somebody and you said, "This is an amazing person. I'm going to bring them in and build a company around them." Mir Imran: Right. So this guy, his name is Glen McLaughlin. He actually got his Ph.D. at Stanford. He started to work for me in 1991. He had just graduated from Carnegie Melon as an undergrad, and he worked with me for five years and then left to get his Ph.D. at Stanford. H...