Here's my thinking, and I'd love some feedback on this. I live in Minneapolis, home of more Fortune 500 companies per capita than anywhere else on Earth (really!). These giants are full of very smart engineers that are frustrated and stifled by the nature of the beast they work in. I want to try to poach talent out of the giants by, among other things, offering a chance to work with technology that wasn't chosen by two years of committee meetings. And of course the speed, clarity of purpose, and control over their own destinies that comes with a startup.

This gets to another value of mine, and is going to play into my hiring. I want to hire people who have real-world experience in mainstream enterprise programming/ops. I'm building a product targeted at simplifying the lives of enterprise engineers, and I think it's very important that I hire people who have felt the customer's pain directly. I could get kids fresh out of school, but they won't have that experience.