Imagine the clouds dripping.Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.

A: One of our rules was, we don’t want to hire your friends. Another rule was not to hire people from “lesser” universities. Another rule was to only hire people with good GPAs. It was frustrating, but it meant that we ended up with a lot of really smart people from great universities, and that served us well.

At Novell, we had what I called “glue” people. They sit at the boundaries, and help everyone work together. I tried to get rid of them because you don’t “need” them, but they kept coming back. I was telling Larry and Sergey about this, and they said, “Why don’t we just review all the hiring?” After that, we reviewed all the hiring packets and threw out all the glue people. One time, we had a guy that a founder didn’t want to hire because his last name was too humorous. We hired him.
Because we don’t fire people, it’s really important who you hire. The people that you hire make your culture. We’d hire people who were special in some way. You don’t hire generic people — you hire people who have had stress and achievement. The best people to hire are CFOs who’ve gone bankrupt, because they’ve been through the wars.