People are your greatest asset. When building a company, nothing is more important than the people who will help you lead it. To help guide your decision making, we wanted to share our favorite quotes from the women and men who inspire us.

1) “You can have the best strategy and the best building in the world, but if you don’t have the hearts and minds of the people who work with you, none of it comes to life.” – Renee West, Former President and COO, Luxor Excalibur Hotel

2) “Time and time again I’ve seen people with a background of broad-ranging employment and skills hired for a job where they didn’t necessarily tick the specialist criteria boxes, but become incredibly successful by offering a new level of understanding to the role.” – Richard Branson, Investor, Author and Philanthropist

3) “The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong – profoundly wrong. ” – Vivienne Ming, Theoretical Neuroscientist and AI expert

4) “Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield.” – Marcus Buckingham, Author and Business Consultant

5) “Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.” – Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO

6) “In determining the right people, the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience.” – Jim Collins, Author and Consultant

7) “Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can’t tell you whether someone will fit into a company’s culture.” – Howard Schultz, Former Starbucks CEO

8) “Hiring more women and people of color is a ‘business imperative.” –Indra Nooyi, the CEO and chairman of PepsiCo

9) “Companies are about the people. You can’t do everything yourself, so you need to gather a team of smart, creative people and empower them. It’s about picking your team and throwing out big challenges.” – Jess Lee, Partner at Sequoia Capital

10) “We look for curiosity and agility – people who are committed to what they do and have a mindset of never graduating. With the innovation and disruption today, there’s never a point in time when we can stop learning. And the job you want may not exist yet today. So we look for people who always stay curious, ask questions, and never stop learning.” – Cathy Engelbert, the first female appointed Chief Executive Officer of a ‘Big Four’ at Deloitte

11) “We’ve found that employees who live full, happy lives tend to be the most effective contributors.” – Jennifer Hyman, CEO, Rent the Runway

12) “When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn’t have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else’s.” – Richard Branson, Investor, Author and Philanthropist

13) “When you start to prioritize hiring likable people within your organization, these likable people will attract other likable people.” –Karen Salmansohn, best-selling Author

14) “If you are in a hiring position, hire someone that is nothing like you. We keep looking for the commonalities but find someone with commonalities that are nothing like you.” – Bozoma Saint John, Marketing Executive, previously at Uber

15) “When I’m hiring someone I look for magic and a spark. Little things that intuitively give me a gut feeling that this person will go to the ends of the earth to accomplish the task at hand.” – Tommy Mottola, Music Executive

16) “Real-time feedback and coaching promotes learning. When feedback is connected to compensation, feedback is muted, distorted, and given less frequently.” – Jennifer Hyman, CEO and CoFounder of Rent the Runway

17) “I think the most important thing is you hire people whose personal values match the corporate core values – and not just the stated ones.” – Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

18) “The goal is to not be patted on the back for hiring a woman, because it shouldn’t be an exceptional thing. It should just be commonplace that women should have equal opportunities as men.” – Margaret Qualley, Actress

19) “Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they’ll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they’ll bring you down.” – Jason Fried, Founder and CEO at Basecamp

20) “Hiring’s tough. It’s not just filtering through hundreds of applications and blocking out big chunks of your day for interviews – those are the simple parts. The difficult thing is the nagging feeling that, despite your best efforts, the perfect candidate will somehow fall through the cracks.” – Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit

21) “We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.” – Matt Mullenweg, Entrepreneur and Developer

22) “One thing I never thought about in my big-company job? Cash flow. When your business has billions of dollars in revenue, you can make a lot of mistakes and still have a viable business. But in a startup, make a few hiring mistakes, and you can find yourself in real jeopardy fast.” – Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and Co-Founder of Ellevest

23) “Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone’s life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those.” – Tobias Lutke, Founder and CEO of Shopify

24) “Managers have to demand more of their HR departments, and they have to demand more of themselves. And we all have to be open to hiring people that don’t look like us and that don’t sound like us, and not find that threatening.” – Joanna Coles, Chief Content Officer for Hearst Magazines

25) “If you are other, you don’t think twice about hiring people who are other.” – Courtney A. Kemp, Television Writer and Producer

26) “True leadership isn’t about having an idea. It’s about having an idea and recruiting other people to execute on this vision.” – Leila Janah, Founder and CEO of Samasource and LXMI

27) “I heavily overinvest in recruiting. I have an understanding with certain search firms that if you find someone great, don’t wait until there’s a job opening – send him to me.” – Kevin P. Ryan, Investor and Entrepreneur

28) “In order to build a rewarding employee experience, you need to understand what matters most to your people.” – Julie Bevacqua, CMO of Quickmobile

29) “I always tell people that you should only hire people to be on your team if you would work for them.” – Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CoFounder and CEO

30) “I decided what mattered was skills. I was going to go hire the best and the brightest, and people who were going to bring their passion and dedication and work hard. And actual experience in the field or related fields didn’t matter. That opens up a lot of hiring because then you can just look for skills.” – Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO

31) “When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.” – Betty Bender, Executive and Author

32) “My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.” – Elon Musk, Entrepreneur, Founder of SpaceX and Tesla CEO

33) “We hire based on this idea of being bright versus smart. You need to be smart to be bright, but bright means individuals are less risk-averse. It means they’re more intellectually curious.” – Mike Smith, President and COO, Stitch Fix

34) “It’s not about being included. It’s about creating your own space and including yourself and then finding other people that are like, ‘okay.’ This is about hiring for company culture, which is a major perk of being a founder. There’s a reason this approach is trending.” – Sophia Amoruso, Founder of NastyGirl

35) “Find the smartest people you can and surround yourself with them.” – Marissa Meyer, CEO, Yahoo!