There’s nuance to everything. This post is a reflection of my observations of small-to-medium-sized startups, including both the ones I’ve worked for and the ones I’ve mentored. It also probably captures a lot of my experience working at larger organizations. In fact, let’s start there.

Geico (or as they’d prefer you write it, GEICO) has over 100,000 employees. I was one of them for over 4 years. When a company reaches this size, they are forced to create an assembly line. Process and conformity are the tools wielded to ensure repeatable success. There’s a reason why Japanese assembly lines were so productive and their methods made their way to the United States. Being part of an assembly line is not inherently bad. In fact, it is often good. I’d hope for process and conformity for airplane manufacturing and maintenance, for example. Things tend to go wrong when smaller companies and startups implement the assembly line mentality.

Before we dive into that, let’s explore the flip side. The craftsman.

(Please excuse the political incorrectness of saying craftsman instead of craftsperson, but I honestly just didn’t want to type that many characters each time.)

The craftsman makes furniture in your small town. She works at a lathe day and night and showcases every dining table and rocking chair in a small store. You know every piece was hand-crafted and personal. The craftsman is not burdened by process. He works off feel. Your neighbor might buy one thing from the craftsman, but you should not expect to get an exact copy when you buy the same thing.

Craftsmen, like assembly line workers, care. Both want the best possible outcome. Yet, they get there in very different ways. The craftsman is stymied by process. They cannot conform because if they did, it would no longer be a craft and the output would lose all life. Things would slow down. The assembly line worker cannot be free-spirited because the stakes are higher. This can be as simple as the size of the company they work for or as complex as the product they are creating.

Why does any of this matter for startups? Startups want to hire the best but are often inexperienced in hiring. This means they gravitate toward those with names on a resume that immediately resonate. They gravitate toward those who have what immediately stands out as experience. The problem with this is that experience and name recognition often means the candidates worked for larger, brand-name companies. These companies may have once been startups, but today they are behemoths. A candidate whose last job was at Google is a candidate with big company experience, not startup experience.

For almost every startup from pre-seed to Series B, assembly line workers will hinder progress. Again, nuance is necessary here. But when you are trying to find product market fit or trying to find the growth levers to take you to the next stage, process only slows things down. What you need are craftsmen who will build bespoke solutions to bespoke problems.

A craftsman looks different, person-to-person. One craftsman might be a Computer Science graduate with ten years of experience at very early-stage startups. Another craftsman might have never had formal training and never worked at a startup in their life. Your job is to find the right craftsman and not overlook people because of perceived qualifications.

Qualifications are for assembly lines. What are the qualifications for the artist being commissioned to paint murals downtown? Was it their education? Was it the names of the companies they worked for? More likely, the qualifications you care about are past outputs. The same applies to your early-stage hiring.

Hire assembly line workers when the time is right. Hire craftsmen early. Making a mistake at either of these stages can slow your business and even kill it. You don’t get many opportunities to correct mistakes when building a startup, so try not to create unforced errors along the way.