P503 - Five things SaaS Founders should look for when hiring a game changer, with Hiroki Takeuchi, Founder and CEO, GoCardless

For any CEO, one of their most important challenges is to hire extraordinary people - Game Changers - to join their senior leadership team. Notion research has shown that one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful tech companies and the rest is largely to do with the quality of the hiring into the senior leadership team. Paul Papadimitriou and Stephen Millard discuss this with Hiroki Takeuchi, Founder and CEO, GoCardless

Highlights:
- That one thing that has enabled us to get to where we are today has been thanks to hiring some really fantastically talented people along the way.
- If you plan to hire Game Changers onto your leadership team, then you had better get comfortable feeling uncomfortable because they are so much better than you.
- I look for five things when hiring a game changer. Of all of these an insatiable hunger to build a massive business is the most important.
- Always raise the bar in terms of the quality of people you hire, if not it’s a slippery slope.
- In the early days we paid a high price for a lack of diversity and an unwillingness to value experience.
- We encourage people from diverse backgrounds to join us and do the best work of their lives.

Hiroki Takeuchi is the founder and CEO of GoCardless. GoCardless processes billions in transactions every year and helps tens of thousands of companies around the world take recurring payments using a global direct debit infrastructure. 

With Paul Papadimitriou and Stephen Millard.
Read more: https://notion.vc/resources/five-things-saas-founders-should-look-for-when-hiring-game-changers/