Curate People

This is Nivei and you're listening to

the Naval podcast. Today we're going to

be talking about recruiting, hiring,

team, and culture. There's a famous

quote from Venode Kla, the team you

build is the company you build. Or in

other words, they told you it was a

technology game when it's really a

recruiting game. So I pulled up a tweet

from Naval from August 2025.

Founders can delegate everything except

recruiting fundraising strategy and

product vision. Recruiting is the most

important thing because you need

creativity. You need motivated people.

Ideally, the early people are all

geniuses.

They're self-managing, low ego,

hardworking, highly competent builders,

technical, maybe one or two sellers, but

you can't watch everything. You can't

micromanage everything. The early people

are the DNA of the company. When you

outsource recruiting, when you have

other people hiring and interviewing and

making hiring decisions without your

direct involvement in veto, that's a sad

day. That's the day that the company's

no longer being driven directly by you.

There's now a fly by wire element in

between. There's some mechanical linkage

going through another human, often at a

distance, and other people are not going

to have the same level of selectivity

that you will as founder. The important

size at which a company starts changing

is not some arbitrary number like 20 or

30 or 40. It's the point at which the

founder is not directly recruiting and

managing everyone. The moment that there

are middle layers of management then you

are somewhat disconnected from the

company and your ability to directly

drive a product team that can take the

company from 0 to one goes away. So you

really cannot outsource recruiting.

People think you can. They hire

recruiters, for example. Maybe you can

outsource a little bit of sourcing, but

I would even argue that's difficult. The

reason recruiting is so so so important,

and a lot of it is obvious. I'll skip

the obvious reasons. But one non-obvious

reason is that the best people truly

only want to work with the best people.

Working with anyone who's not at their

level is a cognitive load upon them. And

the more people they're surrounded by

who are not as good as they are, the

more keenly they're aware that they

belong somewhere else or they should be

doing their own thing. The best teams

are mutually motivated. They reinforce

each other. Everyone's trying to impress

each other. One good test is when you're

recruiting a new person, you should be

able to say to them, "Walk into that

room where the rest of the team is

sitting, take anyone you want, pick them

at random, pull them aside for 30

minutes, and interview them. And if you

aren't impressed by them, don't join.

When you do that test, you will

instinctively flinch at the idea of them

interviewing randomly a certain person

that's kind of in the back of your mind.

That's the person you need to let go

because that's the person keeping you

from having this high functioning team

that all wants to impress each other.

That's the bar you have to keep.

Especially for all the people you're

going to directly manage, the first 20,

the first 30, the first 40, the first

10, whatever that number is. In those

early people that you directly manage,

what are you looking for? There's the

old Warren Buffett line of intelligence,

energy, integrity. I would add low ego.

Low ego people are just much easier to

manage. They tend to engage less in

interpersonal conflict. They care more

about the work than about politicking or

fighting for credit. You just scale

better. You'll be able to manage 30 or

40 low ego people when you might only be

able to manage five high ego people

because you're always massaging their

egos. So I think Venode's phrase is

absolutely correct. The team you build

is the company you build especially for

the first end people that you are

directly managing. They are the DNA of

the company. Back to the tweet, you

can't outsource fundraising because

investors are betting on you. If you're

outsourcing fundraising, whoever you're

outsourcing to is really the person

running the company. Good investors

certainly are not going to back a

company where there's a proxy

fundraiser. which is why companies that

raise money through bankers are always

starting off on the wrong foot. You

shouldn't need a banker to raise money

for you. Now, in later rounds, it's a

little different because you're reaching

money that's outside of the normal

venture market, but especially in early

stage, if you're engaging a banker,

that's symptomatic of a deeper problem.

Strategy, you have to set and

communicate the strategy. Product

vision. This is the one that's up for

debate. There are some founders who

outsource product vision. But I would

argue that because your job here is to

take the best team you can find and

distill their energy into a perfect

product to instantiate their knowledge

and creativity into a product. You need

to unify the product vision. One person

needs to hold any complex product

entirely in their head. And this is

where it helps to have more than one

founder because it's rare that someone

can fund raise and recruit and hold

product vision entirely in their head.

Steve Jobs was one of these people. Elon

Musk is probably another one. But

usually you see a twoerson team. One

person who's better at selling, although

it helps if they have some builder

background, so they know what they're

talking about, and one person who's

better at building, but it helps if they

have a little bit of a seller bone

because they're probably going to be

recruiting the other builders. I don't

think you can outsource any of those

four. There are cases where product

vision has been outsourced. There's some

brilliant person underneath who's

driving the product vision, but those

are rare. Usually, all four are handled

by the core founding team. There will

never be a better recruiter in the

company than the founder. And I mean

that in two ways. One, in any successful

startup, the founder is always a great

recruiter. But there's also the flip

side of that, which is the quality of

the founder as a recruiter, as a human

being, or as a contributor is a cap on

the quality of anybody you're going to

bring into the organization. You're

never going to be able to hire anybody

who's better than you are, right? People

say hire people who are better than you.

I don't think that really works. People

who are better than you don't want to

work for you for long. Now, it may be

different down the road when you've

built a huge enterprise and there's a

network effect, an amazing product, then

maybe you can hire people who are better

than you because you're bringing a lot

more than just you. But early on, all

you're bringing to the startup is you.

And for people to want to work for you,

you have to be at least on their level.

This is why I think early stage

investors judge the founding team so

heavily. They don't even care about

early progress, at least the good ones

don't, or about partnerships or domain

expertise. They just want to see how

good you are. And the clearest way you

can show how good you are is by

recruiting great people.

>> Another reason you can't outsource

recruiting is that recruiting takes a

tremendous amount of creativity.

Otherwise, you're going to be doing the

same cookie cutter stuff that every

other company in the world is doing, and

you're going to end up with the same

interchangeable talent every other

company has. So, don't take the fact

that you don't know anything about

recruiting as a negative.

>> Absolutely. In my own most recent

company, I think I've recruited the best

team I've ever worked with by far and

have broken so many rules. Every single

hire, we had to break some core rule of

recruiting. I won't go into all of them

because some of those are still tricks

that are valid in the environment. Some

of those are probably pushing

boundaries, but we break every rule. We

break all the objections around

commuting. We'll break the objections

around, "Oh, I'm having a kid." We'll

break the objections around, "Oh, I

can't afford to exercise these options."

We'll break the objections around, "Oh,

but I'm at a university." We'll even

break the objections around people who

may have goals like, "Oh, I want to be

surrounded by the best scientists, or I

want to work in a different kind of

environment." In the 2025 environment,

everyone is trying so hard to recruit AI

people and engineers. The demand for top

level engineers is higher than ever

because they're so leveraged through the

new tools. And you can just see that in

the salary offers that are going out to

the top people. You just have to be

incredibly creative. You just have to

break rules. This is another reason why

you can't outsource recruiting because

when you outsource it, you're

outsourcing to someone else who doesn't

know what rules they can break and what

they can't. Their HR or they're afraid

that they'll break some rule that you're

not going to be happy with them

breaking. But as a founder, you can

break rules around the cap table. You

might be giving a certain amount of

stock to each employee, but one might

come along for whom you have to break

the rules. Or you have to convince them

why you can't break the rules for them.

Or you have to structure their stock

compensation in a different way or their

salary in a certain way or their start

date or their hours or their location or

their title or who they're working with

or who they're reporting to or what

their office is like or who they get to

hire or what say they get to have in

what part of the product or in what part

of the company or how they get to

straddle roles across different parts of

the company. You're going to have to

break rules to get the best people

because the best people are not cogs in

a machine. They don't fit into a neat

and comfortable place. They're

multiddisciplinary and they have to

temporarily dawn an identity of oh I'm

an electrical engineer I'm a software

engineer I'm a marketer I'm a product

manager whatever but the great people

are capable of anything they chose to

specialize in a particular thing but

their input is valuable everywhere and

they're respected by a group of peers my

co-founder has a phrase he likes to use

from Latin primis interparis first among

equals where they're all peers but each

person given their expertise and their

particular knowhow is acknowledged by

the others as being the first among

equals in a given domain. So one person

might be better at naming and branding.

One person might be better at industrial

design. Other person might be better at

electrical engineering or software

engineering or have taste in a different

domain. But a great team will have

multi-disiplinary people who are each

capable of doing many jobs but are

specialized and have extreme taste and

judgment in particular areas. and their

peers are smart enough to recognize

where they have that taste and will

confer upon them the ability to make

decisions in that area. You have to

break the rules not just on recruiting

but also an operator of the company and

how it's structured. Every good company

is idiosyncratic. Its culture is unique

to it. You can't just transplant it. To

give you an example, at my latest

company, we don't use Slack, which is

one of these group chat platforms. And

especially in a small company, Slack

just becomes a hangout spot. It's kind

of like email. In email, it's too easy

to generate tasks for large groups of

other people. I can fire off an email

with 20 todos for other people and it

takes me 5 seconds to generate that

email and then it takes up the day of

the other people trying to respond to

it. It creates this asymmetric ability

to waste other people's time. Over time,

email has degenerated into a medium

where there's very low signal and a lot

of noise aka spam. Even well-meaning

spam from friends, family, and

co-workers. So, we also switch to text

messaging where we understand the

barrier to entry is higher. Like if

you're going to text me, it better be

important. And if you're texting me a

lot and it's not that important, I'm

probably going to mute you. Or if you're

in a group text and someone starts

messaging too much, you exit the group

text, which is why all these large group

texts die out over time cuz the good

people mute them and leave. Slack and

group messaging platforms have a similar

dynamic where over time they degenerate

into a combination of people asking

random questions into thin air, people

prognosticating, people politicking,

people bickering, people talking about

stuff that is not germanine to the work

and they become largely entertainment

platforms for group culture building,

which is fine with a high noise to

signal ratio. Whereas if you don't have

Slack, if you have a question, you have

to really think about and try to solve

it yourself. And if you can't, you have

to figure out who in the company might

have an answer to that question. And you

have to track that person down, which is

highly interruptive. And you have to

figure out how to approach them

properly. You could argue that

communication overhead is too high. This

limits your ability to scale as a

company, which is exactly the point.

When you have a small number of

brilliant people working together to try

to take a product from 0 to one, the

last thing you want is scale. Scale is

your enemy. It just takes a small group

of people to create something great.

Every good founder knows this. One of

the reasons Steve Jobs implemented

secrecy at Apple was to prevent teams

from cross-pollinating too much and

being in each other's business and

trying to take credit for each other's

work. It's also why he moved the

Macintosh team into a separate building

from the Apple 2 team. Elon Musk

encourages people to walk out of

meetings and do standing meetings only.

Jeff Bezos limits teams to two pizza

teams. These are all attempts by

founders to unscale the company to break

it down to smaller components so people

can actually get work done instead of

spending all their time in meetings and

politicking. Slack breaks those

boundaries. It allows 50 people to be in

a group at once and waste each other's

time. If you force people to be

thoughtful about their interactions, you

move from a meeting schedule to a maker

schedule, then people can have

uninterrupted free time to be creative.

And creativity is all that matters

because we do live in the age of

infinite leverage and AI and robotics

are making that more clear every day.

You need to let your people be bored

rather than busy. Always keeping them

busy with make work is not effective.

You need to give them makers time,

builder time, which means large amounts

of uninterrupted free time to do deep

creative work. And then when they stick

their heads out of that and they're

bored, they can go for a run or they can

spend time with their family or they can

even go surf TikTok. No one's judging,

but they get to manage their time

better. Where Slack takes the disease of

meetings and makes it pervasive 24/7. So

now on top of checking your email inbox,

you have to check your Slack inbox and

it has that Tik Tok like insidious

addiction loop where there's a lot of

slop in there, but once in a while

there's a nugget. So you're constantly

now running through this pile of slop to

find that nugget. people can

asymmetrically waste each other's time

by sending one message that then 50

other people have to sift through and

figure out if it's flop or not. So,

especially in a small team, one-on-one

communications are much better. And by

limiting the use of Slack, especially

early on, you can force the team to stay

small. And when a team is small, people

who aren't pulling their weight can't

hide. You can curate it much better as a

leader. You can manage them directly or

work with them directly. and you can

actually deliver worldchanging products.

>> It reminds me of Nasim Taleb's idea of

never hiring an assistant because it

gives you the opportunity to expand your

scale and the assistant ends up having a

paradoxical effect of making you busier

instead of less busy. In July 2025, you

tweeted that the job of a startup is to

find undiscovered talent and distill it

into a product. Obviously the product

vision is there. Obviously you have to

find talent. The key is undiscovered.

That's the part that we haven't talked

about and that I think a lot of people

miss. If you can identify the talent

from afar easily, so can everybody else.

You have to find them before other

people do. How do you do this? Elon is

probably the modern master of this.

Although Jobs, Altman, and a few other

people have also done extremely well in

this regard. The playbook that Elon uses

is interesting. First, you pick a

mission that's extremely audacious.

There's only so many hours in a day.

You're going to work anyway. You might

as well work on something big. The best

people know that deep down. They want to

work on something big. For example, I

think the best people don't want to

build video games or slop entertainment

that's wasting people's lives. They

don't want to build a crypto casino. The

best people want to do meaningful work

because deep down they're aware of their

potential. And so when they see an

opportunity to express themselves as

engineers, as artists, hopefully as

both, because I think the great

engineers are often great artists as

well, they're going to be drawn to a big

mission. So the first thing Elon does

across the board is he picks a big

mission and he frames it in the largest

way possible. We're not going into

space. We're not going to the moon.

We're going to Mars. That's a big

mission. Similarly, Sam Alman stays true

to we're not just building Sora to video

feeds. We're not just building chat

bots. We're building AGI. He's not

wavering from that. He wants to build

AGI. Elon doesn't want to stop at just

electric cars. He doesn't even want to

stop at self-driving cars. He wants

robots. He wants an army of 100 million

robots. Tesla's going all the way. So,

these are inspiring. These attract the

best people. Second, you're early. You

lay out these missions and you do it

before everybody else does. So Elon did

SpaceX long before space was cool.

People thought it was impossible. And so

he managed to attract the best engineers

out of NASA and Boeing and Lockheed and

universities before everybody else did.

Now if you're in a more crowded space,

you need to get creative and find the

undiscovered talent in that space. By

the time someone's famous on Twitter,

it's too late to recruit them. Everybody

knows. Even by the time someone is

pedigreed, they've won all the awards

and the papers. Very hard to recruit.

You have to hack your way to them. So to

be a great recruiter, you have to first

be a great sorcerer. And a great

sorcerer is a good hunter of

undiscovered talent, which means you

have to have taste and you have to have

interest in other people and you have to

put in the time. For example, my

co-founder loves to find tinkerers. He

loves to find weird projects, not

mainstream projects, not the obvious

stuff. He's not looking at who's

training a better AI model. That's too

obvious. Instead, he might be looking at

something adjacent like who's really

into using weird ML algorithms for micro

weather forecasting. Then he'll spend a

day or two going through their GitHub or

going through their paper and really

understanding it. And then he'll go off

and he'll think deeply about it. And

then he'll come back with a tweak or a

modification and he'll email that person

and say, "Hey, I saw your code. I saw

what you've done. I thought it's really

interesting. I wrote a little bit of

code that I think you may want to

incorporate or plug in." Or, "I have a

question." And usually it's a good

question. It's a considered question.

And the person responds well because

here they are off tinkering on the side

and somebody has spotted their tinkering

and has a good question about it. And

the best part is he's not doing this to

recruit people. He's doing this because

that's just what he does for fun. he's

genuinely interested. So, he finds these

weird loners tinkering at the edge and

then I get to go in and recruit them.

Most of the time it fails and sometimes

it succeeds, but you find really

interesting people. That's an example of

how his taste allows him to source a

particular category of people. So, you

do have to look for talent in

undiscovered places. We recently hired

an assistant at the company and it was

just someone I ran into at a restaurant

who was incredibly hospitable and had

never worked a day in their life at a

tech company. But you could just tell

this person was good at everything they

did. Everything they touched was quality

and stylish and they cared. We recruited

them. We took a chance. So, it's about

finding undiscovered talent, not the

obvious talent. And this is another

problem with outsourcing recruiting,

which is you hand to a recruiter, you

hand to HR. They can't bring you weird

people. It's too high risk. They don't

have the taste themselves. Makers have

taste in other makers. Builders have

taste in other builders. Engineers have

taste in other engineers. Good

salespeople have taste in other sales

people. copywriters have tasted other

copywriters. So, it's very hard to

outsource that. As a related aside, one

of my pet peeves is hiring marketing and

PR people who have no evidence of being

able to market themselves. For example,

if you want to hire someone to do your

social media, they better have a great

social media account for themselves.

They should be playing their own social

media game at the top of the game. And

in fact, I would argue the best social

media people are not even hireable. You

have to discover them when they're very

raw, when their accounts are small and

young and up and coming or you have to

contract with them because they know

that their real opportunity is to build

a channel around themselves uniquely and

they'll briefly rent you their channel

rather than hand it over to you

completely.

>> One thing Angelus has done to be

creative in sourcing is to turn our

first floor into a cafe. It's called

Founders Cafe and we have a constant

stream of founders. oneman companies,

twoerson companies that are just trying

to get started and a lot of these

companies are not going to go anywhere

and we will have the opportunity to

recruit them if their companies fail.

This is not an idea that any recruiter

is going to come up with.

>> And I would go one level further. I

think you should open a cafe like that,

not because you want to recruit people,

but just cuz you like hanging around

founders and you like having a cafe.

that's going to be a lot more genuine

and authentic and won't feel like work

and you'll do a better job and then

there'll be an benefits to it.

>> Agreed. We opened it because we are in

the business of serving founders. In

August 2025, you tweeted that every

great engineer is also an artist. I know

this experentially, but let's also talk

about what art is. My definition of art

is much broader than a conventional

definition. I characterize art as

something that is done for its own sake

and done well and often creates a sense

of beauty or some strong emotion. And a

lot of engineers are introverts. As an

aside, I hate the term incel. It's just

a way of putting introverts down. It's

the new nerd, if you will. If someone

says that somebody is an incel, I'm more

likely to want to interview them. So,

let's move away from the slurs.

Introverts tend to want to express

themselves through other things rather

than going out and expressing themselves

directly. So what are they going to do?

They're going to express themselves

through their craft. They're going to

create art. In my current company, at

least half the engineers have serious

artwork they've done on the side,

worldclass artwork. Everything from

elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful

computer art to literally sculpting

things with clay, designing clothing,

designing doorork knobs, water bottles.

There's one who's done incredible music

videos. Really good stuff. And I see a

lot of the better engineers tinker with

the AI art products much more so than

even so-called artists do. I think a lot

of artists are scared by AI art products

saying this is going to replace me.

Whereas someone who doesn't have that

identity of an artist and doesn't feel

threatened by it, it's just a tool and

they try it out to see what it can

create. Anything done for its own sake

and done as well as one possibly can is

art. And great engineers are also

artists. They're capable of anything.

It's just they've chosen to be engineers

and focused on building things. Because

engineering is the ability to turn your

ideas and your art into things that

actually work, that do something useful,

that embody some knowledge in a way that

it can be repeated and people can get

utility out of it. But that doesn't mean

that it can't be beautiful. Again, I'm

channeling my co-founder, but if you ask

him what is the best form of art,

painting, music, literature, etc. for

him, it's industrial design. For

example, if you look at the AirPods, the

way they're sculpted aerodynamically and

still have to be manufacturable on a

machine at a certain price point by

someone in China, according to a spec,

the way they satisfyingly click into the

little resting places in their case with

magnets. The way they pioneered that

whole charging case with the Find My

AirPods product built in. The way they

hid all the extra buttons. The way they

made it carry spare batteries. The way

they fit inside your ear with the

replaceable tips. That is a marvel of

art and engineering. It took incredible

artistry to figure out how to design it

so it fits sculpted into the human ear,

which is a beautiful and natural form,

while still being mass-producible at a

certain price point and making all of

the little elements work together. When

you close the lid on the AirPods, it

makes a very satisfying snap. The way

the curves around it, those are G3

curves. Those are hand sculpted and then

scanned in. Computers can't generate

those. the way it feels in your hand. It

feels like a smooth, polished pebble

that fell from the sky. It's a thing of

beauty. It's a work of art. And I think

people intrinsically know that, which is

why they flocked to Apple products over

various Android products because they

are sculpted like works of art. The care

goes in there and you can feel it. Apple

triumphed as a company of people who

genuinely deeply cared of engineer

artists. That's why to this day, even

all the other founders, even ones who

might have built more market cap

recently than Apple has, they still all

look up to Apple. Every entrepreneur

from my generation and I think many

subsequent generations looks up to Steve

Jobs and his team more than any other

because they were truly artists, not

just engineers. To me, the ideal person

for any role is technical,

an artist,

constantly generating new knowledge, and

finally automating the repetitive parts

of their job through code, product, or

AI. Exceptions apply, but the ideal

candidate for any role should either

have these capabilities or be aspiring

to gain these capabilities. technical,

an artist, constantly generating new

knowledge, call that creativity, and

automating the tedious parts of their

job.

>> I think that's right. And it's telling

that when you talked about automation,

you left out automating through process

or people. That's the worst form of

automation because then that adds

non-technical or non-creative people

into the process and those people aren't

going to be happy in those jobs for long

because they're cogs in the machine and

will eventually be replaced by some

piece of technology. It also changes the

environment because humans are social

animals. If you start mixing them

together, they're always going to want

to accommodate the other people and so

the level of conversation will shift.

For example, if you have a bunch of

politicians in a room and bunch of

engineers, you're not going to be

talking engineering for long.

Eventually, you will drift into common

topics. And in a large enough group, the

common topics are always travel and food

because they're non-threatening topics.

People always degenerate to that. If you

really want to have a strong culture of

people who are missionoriented, you

can't mix too many different kinds of

people. That's where the cult and

culture comes from. Early teams do look

like cults. They are monomomaniacal.

They are weird, but they're all kind of

weird in a similar way. And if you start

mixing too many different kinds of

people, you're just going to get a bland

average, which is not how you're going

to build a great company or product.

It's a regression to the mean problem.

There's actually an old Kora thread by a

famous founder that I won't name where

he says the last thing you want in an

early stage company is quote unquote

diversity. You want a monoculture of

people who all believe the same things.

Because if you don't have that, you're

going to just spend your time arguing

about everything. And you don't have

that time at an early stage startup. So

you need everybody to already be on the

same exact page. And then there's a few

things that you might argue about that

really move the needle on the

performance of the business. Founders

want to be popular like everybody else.

So externally they'll try to project

this image that they're consensus driven

and sometimes they're even stupid enough

to fall for it. But every great founder

I've seen up close or even from afar is

highly opinionated and they're almost

dictatorial in how they run things. Also

early stage teams are opinionated and

the products they built are opinionated.

Opinimated means they have a strong

vision for what it should and should not

do. If you don't have a strong vision of

what it should and should not do, then

you end up with a giant mess of

competing features. Jack Dorsey has a

great phrase, limit the number of

details and make every detail perfect.

And that's especially important in

consumer products. You have to be

extremely opinionated. All the best

products in consumerland get there

through simplicity. You could argue the

recent success of Chat GPT and similar

AI chat bots is because they're even

simpler than Google. Google looked like

the simplest product you could possibly

build. It was just a box. But even that

box had limitations on what you could

do. You were trained not to talk to it

conversationally. You would enter

keywords and you had to be careful with

those keywords. You couldn't just ask a

question outright and get a sensible

answer. It wouldn't do proper synonym

matching and then it would spit you back

a whole bunch of results that was

complicated. You'd have to sift through

and figure out which ones were ads,

which ones were real, were they sorted

correctly, and then you'd have to click

through and read it. Chat GPT and the

chatbot simplified that even further.

You just talk to it like a human. Use

your voice or you type and it gives you

back a straight answer. It might not

always be right, but it's good enough

and it gives you back a straight answer

in text or voice or images or whatever

you prefer. So, it simplifies what we

looked at as a simplest product in the

internet, which was formerly Google, and

makes it even simpler. And you just

cannot make a product that's simple

enough. To be simple, you have to be

extremely opinionated. You have to

remove everything that doesn't match

your opinion of what the product should

be doing. You have to meticulously

remove every single click, every single

extra button, every single setting. In

fact, things in the settings menu are an

indication that you've abdicated your

responsibility to the user. Choices for

the user are an abdication of your

responsibility. Maybe for legal or

important reasons, you can have a few of

these, but you should struggle and

resist against every single choice the

user has to make. In the age of Tik Tok

and Chat GPT, that's more obvious than

ever. People don't want to make choices.

They don't want the cognitive load. They

want you to figure out what the right

defaults are and what they should be

doing and looking at, and they want you

to present it to them. Warren Buffett

says that you should hire people who

have energy, intelligence, and

integrity. Joel Spolski put it another

way that you want people who are smart

and gets things done. What's become

important to me on the intelligence side

is that there's really only one

significant test for a candidate, which

is are they generating new knowledge,

which is just a fancy way of saying are

they creative? because otherwise you're

just hiring a robot whose job should be

automated.

>> I think that's correct. And people may

get unhappy saying, well, you're calling

these people robots. But I don't think

anybody wants to do the same thing over

and over. Everybody wants to do new,

unique, and creative things. Everyone

can be an artist. Not in the sense of

grabbing a paintbrush and painting, but

in the sense of creating new knowledge

and enjoying that process. It may just

be in different domains. Even figuring

out how to hack Twitter or YouTube to

get your word out is a form of creating

new knowledge. For example, a couple of

years ago, the way to get the word out

was probably writing blog posts. Now, it

might be X plus Substack or going viral

on Tik Tok or doing a great startup

launch video. The target is always

moving and people are always trying to

apply creativity to hack that system.

even fundraising. Rather than going and

meeting VCs one by one today, I would

argue you're better served if your

product shows well to build a killer

launch video and a great demo of the

product and try to get it to go viral

online to have a personality and stand

out from the noise. So creativity can be

applied anywhere. The other thing I look

for in people is being selfotivated.

So you don't have to tell them what to

do. You don't have to push them, hey,

what did you get done this week? That's

a famous Elon question and I think it's

a great one, but it is fundamentally

still a management question. It's a

manager's question. It's not a leader's

question. With leadership, you motivate

people. You give them the place to march

to, but they're relatively

self-motivated once they know what

direction you're all headed in. They're

going to figure out how best to get

there and contribute to the team getting

there. And if they have to be told when

to march and they have to be pushed

along and flogged, then they don't

belong in an early stage startup. So I

think being self motivated is really

important and as I'd mentioned earlier

low ego is also very important and these

are pretty rare combinations but high

ego people can just destroy the

functioning of a team. A lot of these

principles are very difficult to adopt

once the company is past a certain size.

For example, you could have the criteria

saying I'm only going to work with

self-motivated people. I'm only going to

work with people who don't need a lot of

direction. So, I can work with as many

of them as possible and I don't have to

look over their shoulder all the time.

But if you already have 40 or 50 people

in the company, odds are you've already

hired a bunch of these people. Then what

are you going to do? A mass layoff based

on what? Some fuzzy feeling about

motivation. How much conviction do you

have? Probably not enough. So, it's not

only that the team you build is a

company you build. Literally the

founders's personality is the company

because your principles and your

non-negotiables and your values dictate

who you're going to hire. The best

founders have extreme taste in people

and in products. They are extremely

judgy. For example, in my current

company, I have extreme taste about

investors. I won't take money from any

VC. I don't respect most VCs. They're

just money managers pushing money

around. A lot of them like taking credit

for other people's work. I've had bad

encounters with VCs in the past. There's

no VC who's going to sit on my board and

give me advice, which I probably haven't

already heard. So, what am I going to

recruit a VC for? I'm going to have very

extreme taste about a VC. My co-founder

has extreme taste about builders. I have

extreme taste about marketers and

sellers and copywriting. I'm never going

to hire a marketing person who can't

outright me. And that's a rare person.

It helps to be very judgy. You do want

to be very opinionated. Anyone who tells

you to listen to others and build

consensus and gather feedback is

implying that you're weak, you're not

good enough at what you do, or that you

have the wrong approach. Good founders

are incredibly opinionated. The problem

is the bad founders are very

opinionated, too. There's a lot of ways

people try to assess whether someone has

the ability to create new knowledge.

Peter Teal has his famous question, what

important truth do very few people agree

with you on? He's trying to find out if

that person has opinions of their own.

Do they have their own ideas? I will

sometimes ask people whether they have

any unique theories that they've come up

with about their hobbies. Even if it's

about squash, I've heard people give me

unique theories about squash. If you are

able to generate new knowledge, you will

start coming up with ideas about how

squash should be played and taught

within the first hour of learning

squash. They might not all be right, but

you will come up with novel theories.

Naval also has one question he mentioned

on Twitter recently, which I would sum

up as, "What do you care about that

isn't popular?" That's another way of

trying to assess whether that person has

the ability to generate their own ideas.

Teal's famous question about a secret is

really from an investor's perspective

where he's hunting for the unique bet

that the business is making because he

doesn't want competition. As he says,

competition is for losers. As we learn

in basic microeconomics, competition

reduces profits to zero. And he wants to

make a unique bet or as Mike Maples

early investor likes to say,

non-conensus and right. But that's for

investing. I think in everyday work, you

want to work with people who are very

good at distilling the insight from

their work on a constant basis. Malcolm

Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours.

10,000 hours is directionally correct,

but it's not exactly correct. It implies

that if you spend 10,000 hours doing

something, you get mastery. Let's put

aside whether 10,000 is the right number

or not. It's not just hours put in, it's

iterations. How many learning loops do

you have that drive the learning curve?

What is an iteration? Iteration is when

you do something and then you look at

the result, you test the results

somehow, ideally against a free market,

nature or physics. Then you ask what

part of this experiment worked or not.

And then based on that, you make a new

creative guess on how to improve that

thing and you do it again. The number of

times you can do that rotation, that

iteration, the faster you're going to

learn. That's the curve you want to be

on. Great people will distill insights

from every iteration. So it's not as

simple as finding one secret. Yes, every

company makes a secret bet. They have a

theory as to how the world is going to

work out that other people don't

necessarily have end mass or it's not

conventional wisdom yet. But along the

way, they're going to discover thousands

of insights and each one will build upon

the last and that's all going to be

driven by the number of iterations they

can do. One of the problems you run into

when scaling a startup is you hire

someone who hires someone and that

person is used to a well-defined job at

a larger company. They're used to

getting credit for their work. They're

divorced enough from the end outcome

that all they have to do is kind of

impress their manager. The principal

agent problem. So now what they want is

for their work to not be thrown away. A

common objection you get when your

company scales beyond 20, 30, 40, 50

people is, "We don't want to try this

because it's probably not going to

work." It's actually probably the number

one thing a founder will struggle with

as a company scales that they'll come up

with more ideas in their organization

can execute upon and there will be

internal resistance to doing things

because nine out of 10 ideas are

halfbaked. But really, you're in a

search process, you're in a learning

process, you're in a discovery process,

you're trying to find the thing that

works and you do have to try a lot of

things. And a good founder will have the

ability to iterate on many things and

throw away the things that didn't work

because learning necessarily involves

failure. Remember all new information

starts as misinformation. It starts as

not being obviously true. And so it's

accused of being misinformation.

Eventually over time it's proven right

or wrong. If it's right then it's

information you can then build upon. A

good founder will struggle with exactly

this. My advice would be power through

it. Figure out what is your

organizational capacity to get things

done. Get people comfortable with the

idea that most of their work is going to

be thrown away. It's all experimentation

and it's fine for it to be thrown away

and get comfortable with repeated small

failure as long as you distill the

insights along the way. Baji Shrinavasan

has another way of putting this which is

wandering through the idea maze. You're

taking left turns and right turns and

backtracking and figuring out what works

and what doesn't. It might be in the

rough direction where you started out.

Although it's an ego trip to think that

you're always going to be moving in the

right direction. The biggest impediment

here is pride. People stay locked into

their original vision and they don't

properly navigate the idea maze. It's

about taking lots and lots of repeated

steps and backtracks and side turns

until you find your way through the

maze. This is why even though from the

outside it looks like what a company has

done is trivial and it's going to be

easy for competitors to catch up to them

and it's a common thing to see a startup

break out and then you say, "Well, that

big company's just going to crush it."

No. As long as that startup keeps

wandering through the idea maze, they're

actually much deeper down through the

maze than the big company is. Even if

the big company copies them, by the time

it gets to where the startup is, the

startup has moved way ahead. It's in a

different part of the maze. The big

company can't resist the urge to explore

side hallways that the startup has

already explored years ago and knows are

dead ends. It's this ability to iterate

very quickly and to learn from it and

constantly generate new insights and

secrets. That is a secret to success.

It's not just the one simple secret

where you ask the founder, what is the

thing you believe that nobody else does.

It's literally every single day you

figure out something new that builds

upon something old and you realize, oh,

things don't work like I thought they

would. They actually work a different

way.

>> The side effect that you have to be

willing to tolerate is that great teams

are throwing away most of their work. To

me, the missing ingredient in most

people's recruiting, is intolerance.

You should really just treat every

employee in the company, including

yourself, as an enemy agent that's

trying to destroy the company by

bringing mediocre talent into the

business. It's unfortunately just human

nature.

>> My co-founder and I have a new criterion

in our company, geniuses only. It's a

harsh word, but it sets a very high bar.

Now you can just look around for who's

not a genius. The only way you're going

to attract geniuses, whatever that term

means to you, is by having a company

full of geniuses. And if someone's not a

genius, then either you're transitioning

into the phase where you can no longer

hire geniuses and you just need to scale

up for whatever reason, or you need to

show that person the door because you

hired them prematurely for the kind of

company you're trying to build. Now,

this is very difficult. You're lucky if

you can hire one genius a month. you as

a founder have to identify them and do

whatever it takes to recruit them and

motivate them. So it's inherently

self-limiting given that a person

probably isn't going to stick around

your company for more than 3, four, 5

years. Although in some great companies,

people stick around for decades. At that

attrition rate, you're talking about a

30 to 50 person company. But if you can

even assemble a team of 10 geniuses,

you're way ahead of everybody else. At

most companies, the successful ones, the

founders and maybe a few early people

are at the genius level. But in the urge

and the rush to scale, that gets drowned

out too quickly. I think genius is

actually even a bit of an underused

term. I think everybody does have a zone

of genius. You want to find people who

have already found their zone of genius

or they have the capability, they have

the slope to be able to find their zone

of genius or get close to it while

they're still working at your company.

As an investor also, I have an unfair

advantage. I've often worked with people

where it hasn't worked out in a company

and I have to let them go, but I've

gotten to know them well enough that I

recognize their zone of genius and I can

say, "This is not where you're operating

in your zone of genius, but if you ever

end up doing this other thing, let me

know cuz I'll probably want to invest."

And that has actually worked out

reasonably well in a couple of cases.

So, you're right. People often just need

to be in the right environment. The

thing you can't fix is motivation. If

someone's just unmotivated, if they

don't want to apply themselves fully, if

they have other things going on in their

life, then you just have to cut them off

at this point. One of the things that's

less talked about is often you'll meet

the right person at the wrong time. They

just have internal problems, life

problems, home problems, health

problems, things that are going on that

make them not capable of functioning at

the level that you need. And that's a

sad situation, but it happens all the

time. On a related note, people say,

"Oh, I'm burned out. I need to take a

break for a month or two and recharge.

In my experience, that's largely not

true. Usually, burnout is a sign you're

working on something that either isn't

working or you don't enjoy the work

fundamentally. Just taking time off

won't fix it. If you're really enjoying

what you do, generally that'll give you

more energy and more motivation. There

are rare cases like I know Elon is

famous for flogging his teams until 4 in

the morning and calling staff meetings

at odds of the night and doing crazy

death marches. That's the culture that

he sets and builds. That's fine. In

those situations, I could see certain

people burning out. But even there, what

they're saying is, I cannot sustain this

workload in the future. So even there,

taking time off doesn't work because

when you come back, he's going to put

you to task the same way as earlier. So

generally, when someone says, "I'm

burned out," I just read that as, "I

want to quit." even if they don't

necessarily realize it themselves.

>> You have to be careful about who you

bring into the organization because they

will bring their own sense of aesthetics

without even knowing it. They will hire

people that are like them without

knowing it. For example,

at Angel List, one of the people on the

team was trying to decide between two

consultants that we wanted to hire, and

he was picking the wrong one because he

was like, I think I'll have more fun

with this consultant. The fun one was

more like them in their personality and

their way of carrying themselves and

communicating. My idea of fun is working

on great products and succeeding. David

Deutsch would say something like, "When

you're having fun, you're learning at

the edge of your capability to learn."

If you are not having fun, what does

that mean? You're not getting anything

new. You're not learning. If it's

anxietyinducing, what does that mean?

That means it's beyond your capability.

So, if you're operating at the edge of

your capability, you're in flow. You're

learning, you're doing, you're being

stressed enough for it to be

interesting, but not so stressed that

you're anxious. And it's fun. It may not

be fun moment to moment, but when you

look back day to day, week to week,

month to month, it is fun. What else

would you rather be doing than

practicing your craft at the highest

level of capability at your edge? So, I

do think the fun criterion applies to

business and to jobs. For example, at my

most recent company, the designers are

obsessed with design to the point where

we are getting a new office space. It's

not their job to design it. Nobody asked

them to design it. We probably didn't

even want them to design it. They can't

help but design it down to a tea. It's

meticulous. Similarly, I asked them for

a book in which we could just collect

various checkpoints along the way of the

work that we're doing. The people that

we have, they're designing their own

book binding. They got their own printer

to print it on a special paper. They're

obsessive. They can't 80% design

something. Warren Buffett famously

refused to put a bet on a golf game

because he doesn't bet. He doesn't take

risks. He only does short things. That's

his whole model. The same way a good

engineer

will not let themselves write a shoddy

piece of code. And I know you want to be

practical and you want to cut corners

and you want to get things out the door.

But a truly great engineer is not going

to create something shoddy. A great

designer is not going to halfway design

something. I will delete tweets that

have 10,000 likes on them because I

catch a grammar or spelling error or I

think of a better way to formulate it.

I'll just kill it. I don't care about

the views because I want it to be done

just right. People make fun of me on

Twitter sometimes because I'll put out a

tweet, then I'll change my mind and I'll

delete it after it's gotten a lot of

traction and I'll reverse the order of

two words or I'll change one word. Then

I'll wake up the next morning pass the

edit window and I decide I like the

original one and I'll post the original

one back up and I've lost all the

virality and all the momentum. But I

don't care. I don't want to be

associated with a slipshot statement. It

has to be correct and incompressible. It

has to say something true to me in an

interesting way. And that's more

important that the art is correct than

that it's popular.

>> Yeah. There's an old quote that people

who are not good at their jobs, you ask

them to do something, they try and do it

and then you have to check their work.

The best people, you ask them to do

something and they come back with

something that you never could have come

up with yourself and never could have

imagined. It's high agency people,

founder mode, whatever you want to call

it, but it's people who take

responsibility for doing the job the

best way possible. You just have to

communicate to them what it is that you

think needs to be done. And it's not

just communication. Communication is a

management thing. It's a leadership

thing. So you also have to motivate

them, not in some cheesy rahrra way, but

to help them understand the insight you

have as to why you think it's so

important. And if you think it's really

important, then it's your job to either

convince them equally that it's

important or to be talked out of it

yourself because you might have made a

mistake. And then once they're convinced

it's important, they're high agency

enough that they will just go and do it

in the absolute best way possible. And

to your point about creativity, they'll

come up with new knowledge and new

creativity along the way to figure out

how to solve the problem. And they'll

solve it in a way you didn't even know.

Sometimes you're in a conversation with

someone and a disingenuous person is

going to latch on to the exact words you

said and jump on you. Whereas a smart

person is going to understand the

intention of what you're actually trying

to say. And a highly intelligent person

will often answer the question not that

you asked, but the question you really

wanted to ask or you meant to ask. If I

was going to sum up this whole

conversation, the prime directive of a

startup is to never compromise on

talent. I would rather take a shortterm

hit on customer experience than take a

short or long-term hit on the quality of

the team. I would summarize it in two

words, curate people. And the philosophy

that I have going forward in my current

company and all subsequent ones is that

I only want to work with geniuses. I

only want to work with self-motivated

people. I only want to work with low ego

people. I only want to work with people

who are builders and engineers and

artists and are at the top of their

craft. And that's all there is to it.

You just have to be willing to curate

people. We haven't talked about firing,

by the way. But that's the other side of

it. You will always make mistakes.

Sourcing is hard. Recruiting is hard.

Leadership is hard. I don't like the

word management because great people

don't need to be managed. But firing,

letting go of people is hard, too. But

you have to do it. You're never going to

have a 100% hit rate. Not even close to

it. If you're not firing, it means that

you're diluting yourself. So, you do

need to let people go who don't match

up. Otherwise, you're only going to

recruit people who are weaker than them,

and your company will slowly

deteriorate. One other side note on

hiring geniuses. Only hire geniuses.

That's the current motto. Obviously,

aspirational, but you're not trying to

fill slots. You're not trying to fill

roles. That is a common trap you fall

into. Well, I need to fill a marketing

role, so I'm just going to interview a

bunch of marketing people and then I'll

hire the best one out of that set. Nope.

If they're not a genius, don't hire

them. Just be aware as a founder of what

are the rough capabilities you need and

then look for geniuses who can fill

those capabilities. And if you find a

genius who doesn't fill any of those

capabilities, but is somehow hirable,

hire them right away. So, collect

geniuses, warehouse them. You'll never

regret it. Your challenge may be to keep

them interested because you may not have

the right fit for them. But great people

have a way of identifying whatever the

problem is and getting involved even if

it's not their quote unquote job. So

when you find someone who's truly great,

you just hire them anyway if you can,

regardless of whether you have a slot or

not. It's a mistake to try and fit great

people into pegs and squares and

triangles and holes. The real geniuses

are incredibly idiosyncratic. They don't

resemble each other. You cannot fit them

into a box. By trying to fill a role,

you're inherently trying to fit somebody

into a box. So, I don't even think you

necessarily want to hire for roles. Yes,

you want people to have skill sets that

matter for your company, but good people

are much more flexible than these

artificial rigid boxes that we make out,

which are more of a function of HR and

large companies. Small companies should

not be applying large company practices

that come from multiund or multi,000

person companies. Things like HR and

roles and compensation brackets and

things of that nature. As a founder,

you're always hacking the system. So,

you always have to be incredibly

flexible on your feet. And when you

recognize genius, just recruit