IntroductionCooliris Background and HistoryCooliris Hiring ProcessTwo Unanswered QuestionsAppendix A: Email to Potential CandidatesCooliris: Building an A+ TeamIntroductionIt was well past 2 a.m. at the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) incubator on Sand Hill Road but Josh Schwarzapel, a young and energetic VP of Business Development, wasn’t about to wrap up the night. Across the gray cubicle wall, the technical team, Austin and Keane, were coding at full steam to finish thenext product release. But the team was tired. Three months earlier when his company, Cooliris, received its first round of funding from top tier venturecapitalists, KPCB, Josh had readily accepted the challenge of building up the team from the first four team members into a world class technical team. How challenging could it be for a young company with the backing of one of the world’s most successful venture capital firms, an incredible technical vision, an early product with great traction and another product in the pipeline to attract great talent?Yet somehow it had been challenging to build the team, truly challenging. As a student at Stanford studying entrepreneurship, Josh had learned how critical a great team was to the success of a young firmbut now, in the early hours of the morning, Josh realized that his courses hadn’t taught him how to build a great team. Nonetheless, in Cooliris’s high accountability culture, pointing the figure to the hole in his formal education wouldn’t excuse a failure. Soujanya Bhumkar, the company’s serial entrepreneur CEO, had been supportive and provided advice but Josh could sense the pressure: from the investors, from Soujanya, and worst of all from his friends coding late into the night to keep the company’s head above water. Once again, Josh began the soul searching. Why hadn’t he been able to recruit a great team? He had always been successful in his life, both as a student at Stanford and a collegiate volleyball player but now he began to ask himself, “Is it me? Have I failed?” Cooliris Background and HistorySoujanya, Josh and Austin Schoemaker founded Cooliris in January 2006 with the idea that although the internet has become a fundamental element in the lives of billions of people, our ways of interacting with the internet had changed very little since the first browsers. Indeed, it seemed that the internet hadalways been characterized by what was essentially a media poor experience. Although flash animations and video content had enriched basic text, the way people interacted with the internet was still constrained within the 2D framework of the original browsers.The seeds of change were sown late in 2005 when Soujanya received a phone call from a friend. As the two talked about how to make the internet a more rich experience, his friend suggested the idea of creating a mouse-over preview of the embedded links in a page. The preview would allow the user to see the content underneath a link on a page without ever leaving the original page, thereby creating a more multi-dimensional media experience. Soujanya, a former engineer turned serial entrepreneur, was struck by the idea and began tossing it around with some acquaintances. 1During this period, Josh and Soujanya met for coffee to discuss ideas. Although Josh was still a student atStanford, he too caught the vision of a better internet experience and connected Soujanya with Austin, a fellow student with exceptional technical capability. Together the three laid the foundation for Cooliris and their first product: Previews. The team began working right away, self-funded on Soujanya’s credit card and working part time while Josh and Austin finished school. By September of that year the team had released Cooliris Previews as a free browser plug-in. As it turned out, their hunch proved accurate and the product began to get significant traction, becoming a featured plug-in for Firefox and attracting thousands of users who craved a richer online experience. As the original product began to pick up speed the team came to realize the fundamental value of creating a richer internet experience and dreamt up a second product: Piclens. Piclens allowed users to view online photos from photo sharing sites or internet searches as a full-screen slideshows rather than as the standard thumbnail images that had to be downloaded one at a time in order to view in a larger format. This next product felt like a natural next step for the young company but as the team built the product, their vision of the company began to evolve into something bigger. The team realized that the challenge of creating rich media experiences extended beyond a browser add-in to the fundamental ways in which we code and treat information. During this time period, Josh arranged a meeting with Randy Komisar, a partner at KPCB who had also been one of his instructors at Stanford, to get feedback on the new business model. Although Cooliris wasn’t looking for venture funding, Randy suggested that perhaps KPCB should provide some funding and incubate the firm. After a few weeks Cooliris signed the term sheets and took up residence in the KPCB incubator, immediately next door to offices of such famous venture capitalists as John Doerr and Brook Byers.Cooliris Hiring ProcessAfter receiving funding and moving into the new offices on Sand Hill Road, one of the next big items on the agenda was to hire a top-tier technical team to build out the vision of the company. With great technology ambitions, the team knew that they’d need some of the most creative and technically savvy team-members to help define and build the product and the company. The Cooliris team understood thewisdom in hiring great team members. As Steve Jobs of Apple said, “A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire bozos.”As the team talked about it, hiring great team members seemed like it would be easy given their recent round of highly prestigious funding and their exciting technical vision. New recruits would be let in on the ground floor of a really big idea, incubated in the most supportive setting imaginable and led by great leaders and venture capitalists. What wasn’t there for an engineer to like! Excited about his new role and freshly graduated from Stanford, Josh took the lead on recruiting the newteam, hoping that it would take about half his time, leaving the rest of his time open for business development. Conventional