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Athletes. Every start-up CEO in Silicon Valley wants to hire athletes. You know—the competitive, smart, team-playing professional that can lead, get the job done, and move the business forward. But with companies like Google, VMware and Yahoo hiring everyone under the sun, how does a small company attract the best talent possible in Silicon Valley?

I was asked by a reporter recently, “How do you attract quality employees and what do you do to motivate them?” First off, I speak to a lot of people. I’m always chasing down leads on talent. It’s hard and takes a lot of time. In fact, I just returned from a conference, where I spoke to a number of people - and I know that we will hire at least one person, and possibly two, because of the opportunity I had to share the StrongMail story. Not a bad investment at all.

The best way to attract quality employees is to:

• Talk to a lot of people for leads and networking, even your competitors. \
• Outline your company’s vision and why you will be a winner.
• Outline their potential role within that vision. \
• Outline what you, as the leader of the company, are doing to get the company there.

We have a unique culture here at StrongMail. Talk to anyone on my team and you’ll quickly find out that things change regularly. One reason that we’ve been so successful at hiring great talent here is because of our culture of allowing people to change things up. We like to get a fresh pair of eyes on old problems - and new challenges. In a start-up environment, it’s important to have your athletes stretch their comfort zones.

Think of it like this, if someone is usually a quarterback, either one of my executives or I would propose that this person play free safety for the next two quarters. This way, the person will get exposed to a new set of challenges (which incidentally, can solve many problems with a new pair of eyes), round out that person’s experience, and continue to be challenged. I’ve found this to be not only invigorating for the team as a whole, but very motivating for the athlete.

I feel very fortunate with the quality of my team here at StrongMail. On my management team alone, we have a handful of execs who could easily be CEO’s of their own start-up companies.

More later.