The founder who hires for one trait and teaches the rest
One hiring rule, a 16-year Uber partnership, and 150,000 drivers trained.
There is probably something in your business that used to be the reason it worked, a moat, a market, a way of hiring, and lately you can feel something changing. What do you do when the thing that worked stops working?
Zach Forester has built his career out of exactly that moment.
He walked away from a mortgage company he co-owned when the stress started taking his health. He landed in San Francisco and started a black-car company whose first client was Goldman Sachs. A dinner introduction led him to Uber when it had about 50 drivers, and his fleet grew to supply 5% of Uber’s San Francisco ground transportation. When Lyft’s new anyone-can-drive model erased that moat, the training program inside his company became the next company. This has been a 16-year partnership with Uber and more than 150,000 drivers trained, a program that still runs today.
He went on to co-found an autonomous vehicle company, and today he runs Opttium, an eight-month-old firm that automates and offshores back offices for startups and other companies.
Through building 4 companies the lessons that stay with him: bet on traits, give things up on purpose (delegate), and keep the practices that let you fail through the middle messy parts.
New here? The Inner Game goes out every week: one founder, investor, leader, or expert shares their hardest lessons, insights, and strategies in building and scaling something they deeply care about.
Here are the five ways Zach answers that, from our conversation
1. Hire the trait, teach the skill.
On an early team, where the work changes every quarter and every hire has to be adaptable to the changes the company will continue to go through. Hiring for specific skills in not enough in this environment.
Zach hit that wall at the worst possible moment. His fleet was hiring two to four drivers a week and buying a car a month, and the pipeline of licensed limo drivers could not keep up, so he changed what he screened for.
“I’m looking for a specific trait and not necessarily a specific skill. And I can take people with this trait and teach them how to do what I need them to do.”
In practice that meant hiring baristas, retired teachers, and musicians, then handing them a curriculum. “Give me someone who can present well, has good customer service skills, can basically interview well... and I’ll teach you how to drive and I’ll teach you how to use the app. And that became our kind of secret sauce.”
The trait was the scarce part. Everything else was a teachable, and he built the training himself. When he describes the asset he screens for, it sounds like the one that carried his own career: the ability to think critically, ask the right questions, and say honestly that you have never done this before and can probably figure it out.
To Coach yourself:
Bring to mind the role you most need to fill.
What is the single trait that actually predicts success in it, and how would you recognize it in a conversation?
Which of the skills in your job description could you teach inside ninety days?
Given that, who would you interview this week that you would have screened out before?
2. Even if you want to own it, give it up.
Delegation gets taught as a time problem, a way to buy back hours in your week. Beyond the time constraints, delegation also means giving someone else ownership and decision authority.
Zach has run four companies and he has felt this struggle first hand where he knows he should delegate more, but also knows no one will quite own it like he does.
“No one’s going to own it the way that you own it as a founder... It’s like, what are you willing to give up? And then having the realization of like, what am I actually giving up holding onto this?”
During the years his fleet grew fastest, he turned that question into a system. His best drivers became trainers and then managers, one person was hired to do nothing but hire, and documenting and delegating became the operating rule, “because otherwise it’s a trap.”
His bar for a handoff is deliberately imperfect: “You might only get 80%, but that’ll do.” If the person owning is doing 80% of it as well as you, that’s something you can live with.
The longer you hold own, the more it’s costing your own growth, and the mistakes your team makes after a handoff are the same ones that made you good in the first place.
To Coach yourself:
Write down the three tasks you grip most tightly.
For each one, ask Zach’s question:
What are you actually giving up by holding onto this?
Which of the three would genuinely survive at 80% in someone else’s hands?
Whose is it by the end of this week?
3. The next business was inside the old one.
When the thing protecting your business stops protecting it, the instinct is to look outward for the next opportunity. Zach’s most valuable pivot came from looking at what his company had already built for itself and never thought to sell.
His fleet’s moat was the black-car license, and it held right up until Lyft let anyone drive and the airports opened their curbs to regular cars.
“We had built this whole financial model on having kind of that moat. And once that moat was gone, we started to see revenues go down.”
Layoffs followed and the fleet shrank. What survived was the training program he had built to turn inexperienced hires into professional drivers, an internal tool that existed only to serve his own cars. When Uber’s flood of new drivers created a quality problem, he offered to train them, ran a classroom beta in his warehouse, and posted “an 89% improvement rate for drivers who took and passed the course.” This program spread to 14 markets and became a learning management system he built from scratch.
That program has now outlived the business it was built to support.
“We’ve been partnered with Uber for 16 years now... We’ve put over 150,000 drivers through that program and it still runs today.” Part of this pivot was noticing what was already working.
To Coach yourself:
Take stock of what your company has built for itself: the onboarding, the tooling, the process a partner keeps asking how you do.
If your current moat disappeared this quarter, which of those would someone pay for on its own?
What is one conversation you could have this month to find out?
4. Don’t believe the hype, says the automation founder.
Zach’s company automates and offshores back office operations, and he is onboarding two to three clients a month. Here is his own read on the technology he sells.
“The telling story throughout all of this is that like, don’t believe the hype... Automation, as you know, and AI has a long way to go... It can do a lot of things well and can do a lot of things not so great.”
He has watched this cycle before from the inside, in autonomous vehicles, where the promise ran years ahead of what was actually possible at the time. So when headlines announced the first one-person billion dollar company, he read the ending early. “It comes out that it’s like a complete sham. And I was like, not surprised by that at all.”
His own sequence is organize, automate, optimize, and the order carries the whole lesson. Automate a messy process and you own a faster mess. He also refuses to sell a tool he has not already run inside his own back office, which is a useful standard to hold your vendors to as well.
To Coach yourself:
Where is a headline, or the fear of missing one, driving an AI decision in your company right now?
Name one process where automation has actually worked well within your own business: What would you organize first before you automate anything else, and by when will you have tested it?
5. Build the practices that let you fail thousands of times.
Endurance gets described as a personality trait, something a founder either has or lacks. Spend an hour with someone who has done this four times and it looks much more like infrastructure, built deliberately and protected hardest when protecting it is least convenient.
Zach’s record reads like a run of wins: Goldman Sachs as a first client, a 16-year Uber partnership, four companies. Ask him what it actually took and he leads with the other ledger.
“I’ve failed thousands of times, thousands of times. And it’s hard, you know, it really is hard. There’s a lot of bleak moments.”
By his count he has thought about giving up thousands of times too. Underneath the persistence sits a short list of practices he treats as non-negotiable: a Jungian analyst he saw for “a good part of a decade, if not longer,” work he calls transformational; a yoga habit with a rule attached, “even if the building was on fire... I’d grab my yoga mat and just cut out the door... I had to take care of myself to take care of everybody else”; and protected time away from screens, where “the idea will come just from the silence and the space that’s there.”
He built those practices while the chaos was happening, which is the part worth copying. As he puts it, “you gotta try to surf a lot of waves before you get that one that brings you to shore,” and the practices are what keep you in the water long enough to catch it.
To Coach yourself:
When the last bleak stretch hit, what restored you, and how protected is that practice now?
What is your version of the yoga mat, the thing you would carry out of a burning building?
Where does it sit on next week’s calendar, and who will you tell so it holds?
Resources Recommended by Zach
Alan Watts, the recorded teachings going back to the 1950s. Zach leans on them for the spiritual and inspirational side of the work.
The Tim Ferriss Show, a podcast he got back into. He gleans from it without agreeing with all of it.
The Diary of a CEO, the other show he returns to, in the same spirit.
Leaving you with this question: What are you actually giving up by holding onto the thing you refuse to hand over? Share it with me.
If anything in this article resonated with you, share it with one more person that could also use these insights.
Ways to Work with Me
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC), I have worked with founders and executives, and am the writer behind The Inner Game, the weekly newsletter of Little Pursuits.
My goal is to support founders, executives, and individuals doing one of the hardest things we can do: build and scale something from the ground up.
1:1 executive coaching: Book a 30-minute discovery call.
Founder Circle: Group coaching for early stage founders where you will receive peer support and accountability. Apply for the Circle.
Not ready for this yet? Subscribe to our newsletter to continue to learn from founders, leaders, investors, and experts!
Watch the full episode here:
Read next