Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of payments platform Klarna, answers: How do you hire people whose skill set you don’t get?

“The first few years, we weren’t really a tech business. We were a sales and marketingdriven business. We called people who were selling stuff online to get them to add our payment method.

“None of us cofounders were engineers, so when we started hiring them, that was a big challenge. How do you manage something that you don’t understand yourself? If I were managing a salesperson—since I’ve done sales myself—it would be easy to evaluate: Are they good? Are they bad? What should they improve? When I talked to our engineers, I was dumbstruck. I was constantly asking myself, ‘Is this supposed to take this long to code?’ I had no idea. ‘Should it take this much time to build a product?’ I had no clue.

“Eventually, I sat down with our CTO and said, ‘Show me how you fix a bug.’ I watched the screen as he fixed a bug in the software code. Seeing somebody actually do the work, rather than having them describe it, created a very different level of understanding. The second thing I did was visit a few other CTOs of successful tech companies and discuss topics like recruitment, hiring, and co-development, which is when different teams or companies collaborate on a software project.

“Go and learn. Talk to other people out there who may know more.”