(Technical people are an exception to this rule. You can’t turn a mailman into an engineer overnight, no matter how talented he is. When it comes to technical personnel, the best move is to hire the best you can get. David Turock, who warrants a separate book just about him, and Jeff Goldberg, two leaders of our technical team, were widely regarded as the industry gurus in their respective fields even before we hired them.)

The first possibility was to find a young lion cub who’d somehow wound up in a cage. I’d just have to convince him that our company was his natural habitat, and when running free he could become the king of the jungle he was destined to be.

The second possibility was to find someone who’d actually chosen the right field, started to succeed in a big way, but due to bad luck had failed. Failed big. In fact, the bigger the failure, the more I’d know I’d found the right person. Because generally it’s the greatest undertakings with the most talent and effort poured into them that result in the greatest disasters when something fails at the wrong moment. I call this my spectacular failure theory.

I’d found over the years in business that talent is no guarantee of success. Sometimes you just need luck. The very nature of being an entrepreneur is to take a risk when most others decide to play it safe. To push the envelope. To go into uncharted territory. Sure, you can’t just be foolhardy, and it’s wise to do everything you can to protect yourself and provide a fallback position, but there are just times you’re going to be exposed and if the rope snaps at the wrong minute, you’re history. If this happens later in one’s career, there are generally other past successes the unlucky gambler can fall back to and regroup. Failure earlier along (and due to inexperience and the daring of youth, this is precisely when most failures occur) is likely to prove devastating, leaving the one-time high flyer ruined and depressed.

What a great time to hire someone. You can get him cheap. He’ll always be grateful to you (and loyal) for picking him up when he was down. And you’re not getting an ordinary person, but someone of extraordinary ability. Someone who can think independently. Someone with the ability to bring together a whole set of disparate resources in order to make it. Someone who at one time soared above the ordinary. But he crashed, you say? So what? I answer. Who hasn’t failed? Only the person who never tried. When confronting these people and listening to their stories, I realize how easy it would be for our roles to be reversed. My luck was just better, I realize, or I was just a little more cautious.

I can’t really tell you which of my two theories—the spectacular failure or the lion cage—yields the best people.