By Alexander Young People are the most important part of any business. For fast-growth early-stage companies, it is vital that a founder/CEO fulfilling multiple roles hires the correct people to take the company to the next stage of growth. Research into fast-growing Series A+ companies suggests that high-growth companies hire four to five employees on average a quarter. For founders at any stage of development, hiring can seem quite serendipitous and more art than science. Put a job description onto LinkedIn or a paid jobs board and you will be inundated with offers from recruiters claiming to have the ‘perfect’ candidate for you. In work done by Dr. Bradford Smart, author of Topgrading, the estimated cost of a bad hire ranged from five to 27 times the amount of the employee’s actual salary and, according to Gallup, bad hires cost the U.S. economy over one trillion dollars per year. As a surgeon, I am obsessed with data and reducing risk. When I built the …