Hiring someone is one of the highest-stakes decisions a founder makes. Get it wrong and you can lose time, money, and momentum. And after 16 years of building Showpo from her parents' garage into a nine-figure business, Jane Lu is the first to admit they still do not always get it right. 

But across all those hires, she has landed on one single biggest red flag she screens for, and it is probably not what you would expect. 

In this episode, I sit down with Jane Lu, founder of Showpo, to talk about what that red flag is, how she structures interviews to surface it, why she has built her whole leadership philosophy around being a lazy CEO, and the distinction between dopamine tasks and dividend tasks that explains why so many of us feel busy but stuck. 

Jane and I discuss: 

• How Jane treats her calendar as her external brain, scheduling everything from supplements to podcast links to make good habits frictionless 

• The difference between dopamine tasks (inbox zero, Slack notifications) and dividend tasks (the work that compounds but offers no immediate reward) and how to stop letting the former crowd out the latter 

• Jane's content creation workflow and how she gradually built a small team of offshore editors to take the process off her plate 

• What 16 years of hiring has taught her about misaligned values and ego as the biggest red flags to screen for, and the specific interview questions she uses to uncover them 

• The accidental lesson in delegation that came from leaving her business to go to a music festival, and how it revealed what systems and a trusted team can do when the founder steps back 

• The case for being a lazy CEO: building the right culture, setting up strong systems, recruiting well, and then genuinely getting out of the way 

Key quotes 

"Being lazy is setting up the right systems and processes and really trusting your team." 

"The biggest red flag I personally look for when it comes to the wrong people is ego." 

Connect with Jane Lu on Instagram, LinkedIn and her website. 

More from How I Work 

Check out last week's conversation with Cyril Peupion, a great companion listen for anyone wanting a framework for protecting time for the work that actually matters. Listen here. 

And if you want to get clearer on what deserves your time and get better at saying no to the rest, we have pulled together a Spotify playlist of our favourite How I Work episodes on exactly that. Find it here.