Hire People With Whom You Can Have A High-Bandwidth Conversation

No leader or manager will contest the notion that you should be hiring really smart people.

How do you determine smarts?

Two great nuggets in this interview with Jeremy Allaire, How the Shape the DNA of a Young Company, in Saturday’s New York Times. Jeremy Allair is an entrepreneur out of Boston. He founded Brightcove media.

1. “I put a huge premium on intelligence, so I wanted people who were extremely bright. It doesn’t mean they had a certain pedigree, but I was looking for bright people with whom I could have a high-bandwidth conversation, and who could synthesize really quickly.”
2. “I’m in a unique position in that I have a view across every dimension of the business. And so you have conversations about different parts of the business and you see how quickly they can connect to it, parse it and ask good questions about it. If they ever say, “Yeah, I don’t really know much about that,” that’s a real problem.”

A side note: Jeremy’s first company was called Allaire media. The core product was ColdFusion, a programing tool on which I built my first company.