The first few hires at a company are the most important decisions a founder will ever make. These hires will shape company culture and vision for years to come and can’t easily be undone. At PayPal, Levchin was religious about not making the wrong hire and believed strongly in a unanimous hiring process. If one person on the team didn’t like a candidate, they wouldn’t make the hire. Levchin shared, “There are some legendary-ish tales of me not hiring people because they used the wrong word in an interview…I’m sure we had lots of false negatives, but we have very few false positives.”  It’s better to err on the side of losing a superstar here or there than make a hire that’ll disrupt or ruin a company. A quote from the movie Ronin puts it perfectly, “whenever this is any doubt, there is no doubt.”

http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-hire-the-best-engineers-at-PayPal