1/n An entrepreneur asked me how I thought about location/remote hiring, esp with so many people working from home. I have a framework that depends on two questions: (i) How hard is the problem you're trying to solve and (ii) has this problem been solved before

2/n If the problem is relatively easy, like building an ecomm website or running a customer support team, then there will be a lot of qualified candidates who can do the job. In that case, location doesn't matter that much as you can find people almost anywhere who can do the job

3/n Hiring outside of the bay area may make sense as you can get well qualified people and local comp may be lower than it is in SF. If the problem is hard, then there won't be as many well qualified candidates. The second question is, has this problem been solved before?

4/n If it has, then you want someone who has solved it before on your team. It's much easier and faster to build something the second time. Examples might be the backend of an app that can serve >100M DAU. There are only a few companies that have reached that scale in the US

5/n Ideally you want to hire someone out of one of those teams, and they are largely in the Bay Area with some people in LA out of Snap. That puts some geographic limits on where you can build out a team.

6/n It also explains why most datacenter infrastructure startups are still based in the bay area - those are hard problems to solve and the teams that have solved them (or the last gen solutions) are mostly here.

7/n This doesn't just apply to difficult tech problems. Enterprise sales is a difficult, solved problem. It can have long sales cycles and require mapping decision makers in organizations and having longstanding relationships. So when enterprise SaaS companies go looking for

8/n their sales leaders, they almost always recruit from the last gen of successful enterprise software companies, and many of those people are in the bay area too. The last class of problems are those which are difficult but where there aren't really any experts.

9/n Crypto as of 7 years ago for example. Autonomy in its infancy. Many opensource projects fall into this category. In that case, you need to find very smart people and while the bay area has plenty of them, it doesn't have all of them.

10/10 There is no longer an advantage in domain expertise. In this case you can find your team anywhere you can find smart people, which still tends to cluster around top tier universities but can be much more distributed than the bay area. /fin