Post-Election Cheer: Age Diversity Drives Success

In the wake of our election, this is a true story of age diversity driving success. A little inspiration for us to move beyond our partisanship to work stronger together.

Great businesses include a diversity of great people, young and old, as well as all genders, race and religions. Diversity fosters innovation and creativity, problem solving through different perspectives and broader learning (click to tweet). So while we may have missed the the opportunity to shatter the glass ceiling in this election, we can do our part at work each and every day.

I often hear youth is wasted on the young. But I personally feel experience is often equally wasted on the old (click to tweet). May we learn to combine and share the best of both. Because in what I see, _Youth + _Experience drives _Success _Y_E_S.! 

This thought was inspired not by the election though, but by watching Lucas, the youngest member of our team turnaround a tough hiring situation. He’s part of our Associate program that purposefully includes hiring his replacement when he leaves. The hiring experience is a critical one we want to share with him because our business at _Underscore.VC is all about people.

So Lucas gets to run the entire process from sourcing and selecting to offering, closing and onboarding. During this process he lost his first two choices to competitive offers. In his exceptionally positive South American manner he took the potential disappointment and turned it around immediately, asking for input. This is the trait of a great learner like Lucas. My partner John was sanguine and said “everything happens for a reason”. We all spoke softly of the need to be proactive in sourcing the best people (a truth we all know – that the best people are not actively looking). We also took time to discuss what it takes to find someone who is truly an A+ hire. See 3 steps to hiring A+ people here. 

Lucas not only soaked this up but also contributed his own great ideas redoubling his efforts and refined the specification going proactively into the new search. The result is that just a few short weeks later Lucas came back with some amazing candidates. People we would not have seen, that he found and attracted with his youthful approach. And he has since made a terrific match for our needs, hiring a person with great attitude and aptitude as well as a true passion for what we’re doing to blow up the VC black box. And that’s not all. He found a bonus – more on that at the end of the year when we’ll reveal his great work. For now, this is a great lesson he learned for himself.

But Lucas is also a great example of someone we’ve learned a lot from in his Youth. We’ll be very sorry to see him leave next year but he’ll leave a great legacy. And now he’s gained one of life’s most important Experiences before he’s even left College. And not just about hiring, but about never giving up, and living up to your standards and seeing things through to Success. 

_Y_E_S !

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At Underscore VC, Michael and his team partner with daring entrepreneurs to invest in founders and build from inception to market leaders. As a former entrepreneur turned VC, Michael has backed and built teams that have created billions of dollars of value focusing on large, market-changing technologies such as Cloud Computing, IoT and Big Data as well as disruptive business models such as Open Source and SaaS. Current representative investments include Acquia, Cazena, Demandware (NYSE:DWRE), Mautic and Salsify.

Follow Michael on LinkedIn, Twitter @mjskok, his website, and in his Harvard Innovation Lab class, Startup Secrets. Follow Underscore VC on the web and Twitter @underscore.vc.