Why not today?

The craziest hiring story of my life happened when I had just arrived in Bangladesh.

My job in Dhaka was to launch a jobs marketplace from zero to one.

I had spend a week in Nepal before flying in (that's a story for another day), and had created a huge list of companies whose jobs we wanted to list. Our goal was to launch with 2,000 jobs and we gave ourselves 5 weeks to get to that number.

I had done 10 cold calls from Nepal to figure out if our prospects spoke enough English for me and my intern to do this job ourselves. They did, I got 12 jobs from those calls! But I turned out to have been lucky. When we really started cold calling a few days later in Dhaka, hardly anyone spoke English. The problem wasn't that we couldn't get past the gatekeeper, we couldn't even get to the gate.

We had to hire, fast. We called in the help from another Rocket venture, and they gave us some resumes. The next morning, we had 4 candidates to interview. We hired two of them and one was Arif Adito.

"When can you start?" I asked him. "Tomorrow." He said. Then I asked: "Why not today?" He looked suprised, and said he had to call his mom. He got permission and we all went out for lunch. Then Adito started cold calling, and he closed 30 jobs that first afternoon.

Ever since that moment "why not today" has been one of my core operating principles.

The next time you're in a meeting discussing next steps and someone says they can do their part next Tuesday, just ask "why not today?"