Ask HN: what do you like to see in interviews with entrepreneurs?

Re:Ask HN: what do you like to see in interviews with entrep... by ohashi on Thursday August 12, 2010 @06:19AM (#1597710)

Thanks for this. It's a nice breakdown into 2 general ideas that are very fascinating to hear about. I will keep them in my notepad of questions to think about when I am interviewing people :)

I definitely agree with on the last bit, I don't like asking the same questions I've seen. I will generally try and see if the person has done some other interviews or talked about stuff on their blog and either ask about that stuff (going further) or avoid it and talk about something else. The biggest problem in my mind (not sure if it is only there or not) is whether everyone has the same background information... just because it's out there, does that mean I should ignore it? Odds are in many cases people never heard of the story of the entrepreneur (unless it's a fairly big name). What do you think?

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Re:Ask HN: what do you like to see in interviews with entrep... by drtse4 on Thursday August 12, 2010 @10:28AM (#1598160)

Generic and well-known info (agreed, can usually be quite common things) can make sense for the sake of completeness of the interview but not for much else.

Less known or seemingly trivial background information could instead help to evaluate some of the answers the interviewee give or understand the reasoning behind some of his choices. Just to give you an example, does the fact that the interviewee knew at some point in his life person X or that he previously did Y lead him to do Z? Knowing that X and Y exist could help to find the answer.

These kind of questions aim to explain the why and thus interesting only from a biographic point of view, personally i feel the how to be more useful so i'd limit the biographic data to a minimum, explain only what is needed to give context to the interview.

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