BEN HARRIS IS the CEO of Drop, an Irish tech start-up that is bringing smart technology to the kitchen.

With offices in Dublin and San Francisco, Drop offers home bakers and chefs an innovative recipe platform which guides cooks step-by-step through finding, making and sharing recipes.

There’s an app; a Drop Scale that rescales quantities, substitutes ingredients and offers in-recipe tips; and recently Drop has partnered with appliance heavyweights Bosch to integrate their smart kitchen operating system into some Bosch smart systems to make truly connected kitchens.

Ben, a 33-year-old Dubliner, now divides his time between Drop’s headquarters in Dublin and their San Francisco hub. The company, which formed in 2012, is now on the lookout for a VP of Engineering and a Product Owner. Ben tells us what he looks for in a potential hire.

1. Culture fit is incredibly important. We’ve had some very exciting successes, but honestly, one of the things I’m most proud of is the team of people we have pulled together. The kind of people we hire are really smart, love what they do, and are usually quite open-minded and liberal.

2. What impresses me isn’t always purely education. It’s someone who is very good at lateral thinking. Because of the speed at which start-ups grow, we need to make sure that we have people who aren’t going to be pigeonholed into one individual role. Transferable skills and willingness to learn are very important as the company grows.

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3. Don’t ever think that you’ve ‘made it’. If you’re standing still, you’re falling behind and your competition is catching up on you; someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch.

4. Drive and ambition are incredibly important. Tenacity is one of the most important attributes. No matter how successful any start-up is, every single one of the successful ones has been through some really bad times. The ones that succeed are the ones that allowed those bad situations to galvanise them and they responded accordingly; the ones that don’t are the ones that give up.

5. I would be impressed if a candidate for a job told me about their failures and how they responded to them. It’s incredibly important to be able to learn from what you’ve done wrong and to have the honesty to be able to talk about that openly and reflect on yourself.

6. When you get into the specifics, it’s horses for courses. For our Product Owner position, we will be looking for someone with a huge attention to detail and a passion for beautiful products and delivering a magical experience. For VP of Engineering, it’s all about culture fit: someone who can corral the development team, someone who can get them excited and keep them interested.