The Nepotism That Isn’t

This is something I’ve learned over the years, having watched it happen at company after company. I thought it was worth documenting for future me.

When I was a young programmer in the early 2000s, I was at a consulting company that took on investment money and brought in a new CEO and new executives. The original founder and other members of the old executive team were slowly pushed aside.

I remember watching the new executives bring in their own people, and I remember thinking: wow, that’s really crappy:

• They don’t want to leverage what got us here.
• They don’t value the current talent.
• They don’t understand the company.

And frankly, I thought it was nepotism. New folks were hired into the company at a high level because of who they knew.

Boy, was I wrong.

The honest truth is that running a company is hard. Coming in to run a company is very hard. You’re typically brought in precisely because what worked before isn’t working anymore. (There’s the occasional case where someone is ready to leave for personal or professional reasons.)

I don’t think most VC firms or investors have any desire to have friends or former colleagues running their portfolio companies. They would much rather those companies be doing great and not requiring any additional time or thought.

But that doesn’t always happen, and sometimes a company needs some attention.

When you bring someone new in at the top, you often cast a reasonably wide net. An executive search for a new CMO, CRO, or especially a CEO starts with your network, but search teams also look in other places.

However, the executives who are brought in don’t always have the same scope when it comes to hiring the people right below them:

• someone to lead demand generation
• a new engineering manager
• a VP of something

So what do they do?

Think about it: what would you do if you were under significant pressure, still getting up to speed, and needed to find someone you could trust to execute on a vision you were still figuring out yourself?

I know what I would do. I would tap my network. I would go find people I’d worked with before, people I trusted. There are people I can think of right now who, if I had the budget, I would hire without question. There aren’t many people I trust wholeheartedly, but they exist.

That is what I was watching play out back in the early 2000s, without understanding.

I was seeing executives come in under real pressure to deliver, still learning the environment, and doing what any human being would do: hiring people they knew, people they trusted.