The Best GTM Teams Hire For Spikes

Over the weekend, I watched (for the third time, because it’s so good) “The Smartest Guys in the Room”- a documentary on the rise and fall of Enron.

One thing I took away from it was this blurb:

It got me thinking - while Enron’s outcome was fraudulent/horrible - they were known as a top talent hub in the finance community in the 1990s.

Where did this concept of spikes stem from?

It makes sense that Skilling derived the “spikes” terminology from his professional alma mater, McKinsey & Company, to describe top talent.

As some of you may know, post-business school, I pursued a strategy consulting route, ultimately landing at Oliver Wyman for a year. This was the result of being dinged in my final round at McKinsey for making a minor math error. Guess I wasn’t spikey enough.

I went down a rabbit hole on who else uses this term, and was not surprised to see that it’s a common term McKinsey uses when they hire (I’ve also heard a lot of McK alum use this constantly):

But how has this translated in tech, and more so, GTM? Everyone is looking for top talent, of course, but what does that even mean?

For tech orgs like Plaid and Palantir, they’d rather have people who excel at one thing than be well-rounded generalists. They also hire for spikes.

For Plaid, I remember their founder Zach Perret mentioning on 20VC (and also them notoriously publishing this on their website of how they hire):

At 15:50 in the video, Harry asks Zach:

“In terms of talent assessment, how have you changed your approach, mindset, and appreciation towards talent assessment?”

Zach says “hiring for spikes: this one hasn’t really changed we look for people that are incredible at some things even if they have like glaring weaknesses in other areas” ​⁠

Zach expands that they prefer “spiky” people whose strengths are exceptional, and then build teams that complement those weaknesses, rather than hiring only well‑rounded generalists.

The Plaid founders were former Bain employees (founding story here), so perhaps it’s something that the MBB crowd was discussing at length about how they used to hire, which are known as the most intense interviews in all of corporate America.

When he says, this hasn’t changed, see their publication on this core philosophy Plaid had when hiring GTM - it’s why we included them as a GTM mafia of the late 2010s/early 2020s.

​I love this article by Robert Fink, an early employee at Palantir, that noted this as well:

What we’re seeing is recruiting founding GTM talent at the best AI-natives startups in SF/NYC - they also hire for spikes. I broadly agree that you want to hire individuals who are excellent in their fields (specific in their domain, like sales)

While I feel like for the founding AE role, you need someone who probably skews generalist/GTM swiss army knife, but with a deep spike in closing.

That is someone who is a T shape, as they call it.

Deep in sales, generalist on all things GTM.

I am fully on board with the concept of hiring for spikes - it makes sense. It aligns with the 'hire on merit' movement a little while back. It’s all the same stuff we’re saying, I guess.

You want killers on your team to help drive revenue and do what it takes to win deals in the most competitive landscape (with competitors being formed every day).

Thanks for being a reader/subscriber of GTMBA.

For those who are new, my name is Chris Balestras, and I’m a partner @ VibeScaling - we work with seed through series C AI-natives to help with GTM advisory, recruiting their early teams, content, and investing.

See you next time 🫡,

Chris