内容来源：https://nav.al/curate-people

内容总结：

创业成功核心法则：顶尖人才是公司DNA，创始人必须亲力亲为

在当今激烈的市场竞争中，初创公司如何突围？知名投资人Naval Ravikant在其播客中深入阐述了一个核心理念：公司即团队，而团队的构建，尤其是早期核心团队的组建，是创始人不可推卸的首要职责，绝不能外包。

早期团队即公司DNA

Naval 强调，创始人可以授权许多工作，但招聘、融资、战略和产品愿景这四项必须亲力亲为。其中，招聘位居首位，因为早期成员构成了公司的“DNA”。他们应该是自我驱动、能力卓越、谦逊且富有创造力的“天才”。一旦创始人将招聘决策权交予他人，公司便失去了最初的灵魂驱动力。

为何不能外包招聘？

1. 顶尖人才只与顶尖者为伍：最优秀的人才渴望与同样出色的人共事。如果团队中存在能力不足的成员，对他们而言是一种认知负担，会促使他们离开。
2. 招聘需要打破常规的创造力：标准化招聘流程只能招到标准化人才。为了吸引真正的顶尖、非常规人才，创始人必须愿意并能够打破一切规则——无论是在薪酬结构、股权分配、工作地点还是职责范围上，都需要极度灵活。
3. 识人眼光无法替代：优秀的设计师能识别优秀的设计师，杰出的工程师能欣赏杰出的工程师。这种对同行的“品味”难以通过HR或外部招聘人员复制。创始人必须具备发掘“未被发现的人才”的能力，在他们成名前将其招致麾下。

如何识别和吸引顶尖人才？

• 设定崇高使命：如同埃隆·马斯克提出“移民火星”的愿景，伟大的使命能吸引那些渴望从事有意义工作的顶尖人才。
• 寻找“艺术家”特质：Naval认为，每一位伟大的工程师本质上也是一位“艺术家”。他们对自己的作品有着极致的追求，无法容忍瑕疵，这种对完美的执着是驱动产品卓越的核心动力。
• 关注核心特质：除了沃伦·巴菲特提出的“智慧、精力、诚信”，Naval特别补充了“低自我（低ego）”。低ego的成员更易于管理，能减少人际冲突，更专注于工作本身。
• 营造“天才专属”环境：初创公司早期团队应像是一个“天才专属”的集体，甚至略带“ cult ”般的文化认同感。这意味着需要保持文化的纯粹性，避免过早引入过多不同类型的人才而导致价值观稀释和回归平庸。

小团队优于大组织

Naval以自身公司禁用Slack为例，指出过度便捷的群组通信工具会带来大量噪音，浪费顶尖人才的宝贵时间，助长办公室政治。他强调，创造伟大产品只需要一小群才华横溢的人。创始人应通过各种方式（如亚马逊的“两个披萨团队”原则）主动限制团队规模，为成员提供大量不受打扰的“创造者时间”，让他们能够进行深度思考和创造性工作，而非忙于开会和沟通。

总结：人才策展是创始人的第一要务

Naval将创业成功之道总结为两个字：“策展”。创始人的首要职责，就是以极高的标准和不妥协的态度，像策展人挑选艺术品一样，精心挑选、吸引并留住那些自我驱动、能力顶尖、谦逊务实的“天才”型人才。为此，宁可承受业务上的短期损失，也绝不能在企业文化的根基——人才质量上做出任何妥协。因为，你所打造的团队，最终定义了你所创建的公司。

中文翻译：

甄选人才

尼维：您正在收听《纳瓦尔播客》。今天我们将探讨招聘、雇佣、团队和文化。

顶尖人才只愿与顶尖人才共事

尼维：维诺德·科斯拉有句名言："你打造的团队，就是你打造的公司。" 换句话说，他们告诉你这是一场技术游戏，但实际上是一场招聘游戏。

我找到了纳瓦尔在2025年8月发的一条推文："创始人可以委派一切，除了招聘、融资、战略和产品愿景。"

纳瓦尔：招聘是最重要的事情，因为你需要创造力；你需要有内驱力的人。理想情况下，早期成员都应该是天才。他们自我管理、谦逊低调、勤奋努力、能力出众、是实干型技术人才——也许有一两个擅长销售——但你无法面面俱到，无法事事微观管理。

早期成员是公司的基因。当你将招聘外包，当你在没有直接参与和否决权的情况下，让别人去招聘、面试并做出雇佣决定时，那是可悲的一天。那一天，公司不再由你直接驱动。

这中间出现了"线控"环节。存在一个通过他人——通常是远程的——的机械连接。而其他人不会拥有你作为创始人所具备的那种筛选标准。

公司开始发生变化的临界规模并非某个任意数字，比如20、30或40人。而是创始人不再直接招聘和管理每个人的那个时间点。一旦出现了中间管理层，你就在某种程度上与公司脱节了，你直接驱动一个产品团队、带领公司从零到一的能力也就消失了。

所以我们真的不能外包招聘。人们以为可以。例如，他们雇佣招聘人员。也许你可以外包一部分人才搜寻的工作，但我甚至认为这都很困难。招聘如此、如此、如此重要的原因——其中很多是显而易见的，我会跳过那些明显的原因——但一个不那么明显的原因是，最优秀的人才真的只想和最优秀的人一起工作。

与任何水平不如自己的人共事，对他们来说都是一种认知负担。他们周围水平不及自己的人越多，他们就越是敏锐地意识到自己不属于这里，或者应该去做自己的事情。

最优秀的团队是相互激励的。他们彼此促进。每个人都努力给对方留下深刻印象。

一个很好的测试方法是：当你招聘一个新成员时，你应该能够对他们说："走进那个房间，团队其他成员都在那里。随便挑一个人——随机选——把他们拉到一边聊30分钟，面试他们。如果你对他们印象不深刻，那就不要加入。"

当你做这个测试时，想到他们可能会随机面试你心里隐约觉得不太行的某个人时，你会本能地退缩。那个人就是你需要让其离开的人。因为正是这个人阻碍你打造一个高效运作、成员间相互激励的团队。这就是你必须坚守的标准，尤其是对于所有你将直接管理的人——无论是前20个、前30个、前40个还是前10个——无论这个数字是多少。

在这些你将直接管理的早期成员中，你在寻找什么？

有沃伦·巴菲特那句老话："才智、精力、诚信。" 我会加上"谦逊低调"。低调的人更容易管理。他们较少卷入人际冲突。他们更关心工作本身，而不是搞办公室政治或争抢功劳。

这样团队才能更好地扩展。你或许只能管理五个自视甚高的人，但却能管理三四十个低调的人，因为你总得去安抚他们的自尊心。

所以我认为维诺德的话绝对正确：你打造的团队，就是你打造的公司，尤其是对于你直接管理的前N个人——他们是公司的基因。

你永远无法雇佣到比你更优秀的人

纳瓦尔：回到那条推文：你不能外包融资，因为投资者赌的是你。如果你外包融资，那么你外包给的那个人，实际上才是运营公司的人。好的投资者当然不会支持一个使用代理融资人的公司，这就是为什么通过银行家融资的公司总是起步就错了。

你不应该需要银行家来为你融资。在后期轮次会稍有不同，因为你要接触常规风投市场以外的资金。但尤其是在早期阶段，如果你聘请银行家，那往往意味着存在更深层次的问题。

战略：你必须制定并传达战略。

产品愿景：这一点存在争议。有些创始人会外包产品愿景，但我认为，因为你在这里的工作是找到你能找到的最好的团队，并将他们的能量提炼成一个完美的产品——将他们的知识和创造力实例化到一个产品中——所以你需要统一产品愿景。

需要一个能够将任何复杂产品完全装在脑子里的人。这就是为什么拥有不止一位创始人会有帮助，因为很少有人能同时兼顾融资、招聘，并将产品愿景完全装在脑子里。

史蒂夫·乔布斯是其中之一。埃隆·马斯克可能也算一个。但通常你会看到一个两人团队：一个人更擅长销售——尽管如果他们有一些实干背景会更好，这样他们知道自己在说什么——另一个人更擅长构建，但如果他们有一点销售头脑也会有帮助，因为他们很可能要去招聘其他构建者。

我认为这四件事（招聘、融资、战略、产品愿景）都不能外包。

确实有产品愿景被外包的情况——公司内部有某个杰出的人在驱动产品愿景——但这种情况很罕见。通常这四件事都由核心创始团队处理。

尼维：公司里永远不会有比创始人更好的招聘者。我这么说有两层含义。

第一，在任何成功的初创公司中，创始人总是一个伟大的招聘者。

但另一方面，创始人作为招聘者、作为个人、或者作为贡献者的质量，也决定了你能引入组织的任何人的质量上限。

你永远无法雇佣到比你更优秀的人。

纳瓦尔：没错。人们常说："雇佣比你更优秀的人。" 我认为这行不通。比你更优秀的人不会愿意长期为你工作。

当然，将来当你建立了一个庞大的企业，拥有了网络效应和令人惊叹的产品时，情况可能会不同。那时也许你可以雇佣比你更优秀的人，因为你带来的远不止你个人。但在早期，你为初创公司带来的只有你自己。要想让别人愿意为你工作，你至少得和他们水平相当。

这就是为什么我认为早期投资者如此看重创始团队。他们甚至不关心早期进展——至少好的投资者不关心——或者合作关系、领域专业知识。他们只想看看你有多优秀。而展示你有多优秀的最清晰方式，就是招聘到优秀的人才。

打破一切规则获取顶尖人才

尼维：你不能外包招聘的另一个原因是，招聘需要极大的创造力。否则，你只会做世界上其他公司都在做的千篇一律的事情，最终得到和其他公司一样的可互换的人才。

纳瓦尔：所以，不要把你对招聘一无所知看作是一个负面因素。绝对不要。在我最近的一家公司，我认为我招聘到了迄今为止共事过的最好的团队，而我打破了很多规则。

每一个雇佣，我们都不得不打破一些招聘的核心规则。我不会详述所有规则，因为其中一些在当下环境中仍然有效，有些可能还在试探边界。

但我们打破每一条规则。

我们打破关于通勤距离的异议。
我们打破关于"哦，我要生孩子了"的异议。
我们打破关于"哦，我负担不起行权这些期权"的异议。
我们打破关于"哦，但我还在大学"的异议。
我们甚至打破关于人们可能有的目标的异议，比如"哦，我想被最顶尖的科学家环绕"，或者"我想在另一种环境中工作"。

在2025年的环境下，每个人都在拼命招聘AI人才和工程师。对顶级工程师的需求比以往任何时候都高，因为他们能通过新工具发挥巨大杠杆效应，从给顶尖人才开出的薪资报价就可见一斑。你必须极具创造力。你必须打破规则。

这是你不能外包招聘的另一个原因。因为当你外包时，你是外包给另一个不知道哪些规则可以打破、哪些不能打破的人——他们是HR，或者他们害怕打破某些你不希望被打破的规则。

但作为创始人，你可以打破关于股权结构表的规则。你可能给每个员工一定数量的股票，但可能会遇到一个人，你必须为他打破规则——或者你必须说服他为什么不能为他破例——或者你必须以不同的方式构建他的股权补偿、薪资、入职日期、工作时间、工作地点、头衔、与谁共事、向谁汇报。

或者他们的办公室是什么样的，他们可以雇佣谁，他们在产品的哪个部分、公司的哪个部门有发言权，或者他们如何能够跨越公司不同部门的角色。

你必须打破规则才能得到最优秀的人，因为最优秀的人不是机器中的齿轮。他们无法严丝合缝地嵌入一个舒适的位置。他们是多面手，他们只是暂时戴上"我是电气工程师"、"我是软件工程师"、"我是市场人员"、"我是产品经理"等身份标签。但优秀的人无所不能。他们选择专攻某个特定领域，但他们的见解在任何地方都很有价值。

他们受到一群同行的尊重。我的联合创始人喜欢用一句拉丁语：primus inter pares——同辈中之首——他们所有人都是同辈。但每个人，凭借其专业知识和特定技能，在特定领域被其他人公认为同辈中的首位。

所以，一个人可能更擅长命名和品牌塑造。一个人可能更擅长工业设计。另一个人可能更擅长电气工程或软件工程，或者在另一个领域有很好的品味。但一个伟大的团队会拥有多才多艺的成员，每个人都能胜任多种工作，但在特定领域有专长并具备极高的品味和判断力。

而他们的同行也足够聪明，能够识别他们在哪些方面有这种品味，并会赋予他们在该领域做决策的能力。

你不仅要在招聘上打破规则，还要在公司的运营和结构上打破规则。每一家优秀的公司都是独特的。它的文化是独一无二的。

你无法直接移植。

创造伟大只需一小群人

纳瓦尔：以我最近的公司为例，我们不使用Slack这类群聊平台。尤其是在小公司，Slack很容易变成一个闲聊场所。

这有点像电子邮件。在电子邮件中，太容易给一大群人派发任务了。我可以花五秒钟发一封包含20项待办事项的邮件，然后却要占用别人一整天的时间来回复。这造成了不对称地浪费他人时间的能力。

随着时间的推移，电子邮件已经退化成一个信号极低、噪音（即垃圾信息）很多的媒介——即使是来自朋友、家人和同事的好意垃圾信息。

所以我们全都转向了短信，因为我们明白短信的门槛更高。比如，"如果你要发短信给我，最好是很重要的事。" 如果你经常给我发些不重要的事，我可能会屏蔽你。或者如果你在一个群聊里，有人开始发太多信息，你会退出群聊，这就是为什么这些大型群聊会随着时间的推移而消失——因为优秀的人会屏蔽或离开它们。

Slack和群聊平台也有类似的动态，随着时间的推移，它们会退化成：人们向空气随意提问、人们预测未来、人们搞办公室政治、人们争吵、人们谈论与工作无关的事情。它们很大程度上变成了用于群体文化建设的娱乐平台——这本身没问题——但信噪比很高。

而如果你没有Slack，当你遇到问题时，你必须真正思考并尝试自己解决。如果解决不了，你必须找出公司里谁可能有答案，然后你得找到那个人，这非常打扰对方，而且你得想好如何恰当地去请教。

你可能会说这样沟通开销太大了。这限制了公司规模化扩张的能力。

而这恰恰是重点。

当你只有少数优秀的人一起努力将产品从零做到一时，你最不想要的就是规模。规模是你的敌人。

创造伟大只需一小群人。

每个优秀的创始人都明白这一点。史蒂夫·乔布斯在苹果推行保密制度的原因之一，就是防止团队过度交叉影响、互相干涉、争抢功劳。这也是为什么他把Macintosh团队搬到与Apple II团队分开的办公楼。埃隆·马斯克鼓励人们离开会议，只进行站立会议。杰夫·贝索斯将团队限制在"两个披萨团队"的规模。这些都是创始人试图"反规模化"公司的尝试——将其分解成更小的组成部分，以便人们能够真正完成工作，而不是把所有时间花在开会和搞办公室政治上。

Slack打破了这些界限。它允许50个人同时在一个群里互相浪费时间。如果你迫使人们认真思考他们的互动方式，你就能从"会议日程"转向"创造者日程"。这样人们就能拥有不受打扰的自由时间来进行创造。而创造力才是最重要的，因为我们确实生活在无限杠杆的时代，AI和机器人技术每天都在让这一点变得更加清晰。

你需要让你的员工感到"无聊"，而不是"忙碌"。总是让他们忙于琐碎的工作是低效的。你需要给他们"创造者时间"——"构建者时间"——这意味着大量的、不受打扰的自由时间，用于进行深度的创造性工作。

然后，当他们从工作中抬起头来感到"无聊"时，他们可以去跑步，或者陪伴家人，甚至可以去刷TikTok——没人会评判——但他们可以更好地管理自己的时间。而Slack则把会议的弊病变得无处不在：7天24小时。

所以现在除了检查电子邮件收件箱，你还得检查Slack收件箱。而且它带有类似TikTok那种阴险的成瘾循环，里面有很多垃圾信息，但偶尔会有一两个精华。所以你不断地在这堆垃圾信息中翻找，寻找那点精华。人们可以通过发送一条信息，不对称地浪费彼此的时间，然后其他50个人不得不筛选，判断这是不是垃圾信息。

因此，尤其是在小团队中，一对一的沟通要好得多。通过限制使用Slack，尤其是在早期，你可以迫使团队保持小规模。而当团队规模小时，不称职的人无处藏身。作为领导者，你可以更好地进行甄选。你可以直接管理他们，或直接与他们合作，你才能真正交付改变世界的产品。

尼维：这让我想起纳西姆·塔勒布的一个观点：永远不要雇佣助理，因为这给了你扩大规模的机会，而助理最终会产生一个悖论效应，让你变得更忙，而不是更闲。

在他人之前发现未被发掘的人才

尼维：在2025年7月，你发推说："初创公司的工作是发现未被发掘的人才，并将其提炼成产品。"

纳瓦尔：显然产品愿景是存在的。显然你必须找到人才。关键是"未被发掘"。这是我们还没谈到、而且我认为很多人忽略的部分。

如果你能轻易地从远处识别出人才，那么其他人也能。你必须在别人之前找到他们。你怎么做到这一点？埃隆可能是现代这方面的大师。尽管乔布斯、奥特曼等少数人在这一点上也做得非常出色。埃隆使用的方法很有趣。

首先，选择一个极其大胆的使命。一天只有这么多小时。你反正都要工作。不如做些大事。最优秀的人内心深处明白这一点。他们想做大事。

例如，我认为最优秀的人不想制作电子游戏或浪费生命的娱乐垃圾。他们不想建立一个加密赌场。最优秀的人想做有意义的工作，因为他们内心深处意识到自己的潜力。所以，当他们看到一个机会，能够作为工程师、作为艺术家——希望两者兼而有之，因为我认为伟大的工程师往往也是伟大的艺术家——来表达自己时，他们会被一个宏大的使命所吸引。

所以埃隆做的第一件事，就是选择一个宏大的使命，并以尽可能宏大的方式表述它：
"我们不是进入太空；我们不是去月球；我们要去火星。"
这是一个宏大的使命。

同样，萨姆·奥特曼始终坚持"我们不仅仅是构建Sora 2视频流；我们不仅仅是构建聊天机器人；我们正在构建AGI（通用人工智能）。"他从未动摇。他想构建AGI。

埃隆不满足于只做电动汽车。他甚至不满足于只做自动驾驶汽车。他想要机器人。他想要一支上亿的机器人大军。特斯拉要走到底。所以这些都很鼓舞人心。这些吸引了最优秀的人。

第二，你要早。你要在这些使命上布局，并且要在其他人之前行动。所以埃隆在太空领域还没火起来之前就创立了SpaceX。当时人们认为这不可能，因此他成功地在其他人之前，吸引了来自NASA、波音、洛克希德·马丁和大学的最优秀的工程师。

现在，如果你身处一个更拥挤的领域，你需要发挥创造力，在该领域找到未被发掘的人才。等到某人在Twitter上出名时，再招聘他们就太晚了。所有人都知道了。甚至等到某人拥有漂亮的履历——赢得了所有奖项，发表了论文——也很难招聘了。你必须想办法"搞定"他们。

所以要成为一个伟大的招聘者，你首先必须是一个伟大的人才搜寻者，而一个伟大的人才搜寻者善于发现未被发掘的人才，这意味着你必须具备品味，你必须对他人感兴趣，并且你必须投入时间。

例如，我的联合创始人喜欢寻找喜欢捣鼓东西的人。他喜欢寻找奇怪的项目——不是主流项目，不是那些显而易见的东西。他不会去看谁在训练更好的AI模型。那太明显了。

相反，他可能会看一些相邻的领域，比如："谁真正热衷于使用奇怪的机器学习算法进行微天气预测？"然后他会花一两天时间浏览他们的GitHub或论文，真正理解它。然后他会离开，深入思考。

之后他会带着一个调整或修改方案回来，给那个人发邮件说："嘿，我看到了你的代码。我看到了你所做的。我觉得非常有趣。我写了一点代码，觉得你可能会想整合或接入。"

或者，"我有个问题，"而且通常是个好问题——是经过深思熟虑的问题。对方会回应得很好，因为他们只是在业余时间捣鼓，而有人注意到了他们的捣鼓，并对此提出了一个好问题。

最妙的是，他这样做不是为了招聘人——他这样做是因为这本身就是他的乐趣所在。他是真的感兴趣。所以他找到了这些在边缘地带独自捣鼓的怪才，然后由我去招募他们。大多数时候会失败，但有时会成功。但你能找到非常有趣的人。

这是一个例子，说明他的品味如何让他能够搜寻到特定类别的人。

所以你确实需要在未被发掘的地方寻找人才。

优秀的人对他人有品味

纳瓦尔：我们公司最近招聘了一位助理——类似办公室管理员的职位——只是我在一家餐厅遇到的人，他极其好客，而且从未在科技公司工作过一天。

但你能感觉到这个人做什么都做得很好。他们经手的每件事都很有品质和格调，而且他们很用心。我们招募了他；我们冒了这个险。

所以关键在于发现未被发掘的人才，而不是那些显而易见的人才。这是外包招聘的另一个问题，就是你把它交给招聘人员，交给HR——他们无法给你带来"怪才"。风险太高了。他们自己也没有那种品味。创造者对其他创造者有品味。构建者对其他构建者有品味。工程师对其他工程师有品味。优秀的销售人员对其他销售人员有品味。文案撰稿人对其他文案撰稿人有品味。所以这很难外包。

顺便说一句，一个让我很反感的事情是，雇佣那些没有证据表明能够营销自己的营销和公关人员。

例如，如果你想雇人管理你的社交媒体，他们自己最好有一个很棒的社交媒体账号。他们应该在自己的社交媒体领域玩到顶尖水平。

事实上，我认为最优秀的社交媒体人才甚至是不可能被雇佣的。你必须在他们还很稚嫩、账号还很小、处于上升期时发现他们。或者你必须与他们签约合作，因为他们知道他们真正的机会是围绕自身建立独特的频道，他们只会短暂地把频道"租"给你，而不是完全交给你。

尼维：AngelList为了在人才搜寻上更具创造性所做的一件事，是把我们的一楼改造成了一个咖啡馆——叫做"创始人咖啡馆"——我们这里有源源不断的创始人：一人公司、两人公司，他们刚刚起步。这些公司很多都不会成功，如果他们的公司失败了，我们将有机会招募他们。

这不是任何一个招聘人员会想出来的主意。

纳瓦尔：我会更进一步。我认为你应该开一个那样的咖啡馆，不是因为你想要招聘人，而是因为你喜欢和创始人待在一起，你喜欢有个咖啡馆。那样会更真实、更真诚，不会感觉像工作，你会做得更好，然后自然会产生附带的好处。

尼维：同意。我们开这个咖啡馆是因为我们的业务就是服务创始人。

每一位伟大的工程师也是一位艺术家

尼维：在2025年8月，你发推说"每一位伟大的工程师也是一位艺术家。"

纳瓦尔：我根据经验知道这一点，但我们也来谈谈什么是艺术。我对艺术的定义比传统定义要宽泛得多。

我将艺术描述为：为其自身而做的事情，并且做得很好，通常能创造一种美感或某种强烈的情感。

而且很多工程师是内向的人。

顺便说一句，我讨厌"非自愿

英文来源：

Curate People
Nivi: You’re listening to the Naval Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about recruiting, hiring, team, and culture.
The Best Only Want to Work With the Best
Nivi: There’s a famous quote from Vinod Khosla, “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.”
Naval: 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 and 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 a 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 zero to one goes away.
So we 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’re going to 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 Vinod’s phrase is absolutely correct: the team you build is the company you build, especially for the first N people that you are directly managing—they’re the DNA of the company.
You’ll Never Be Able to Hire Anybody Better Than You
Naval: 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 fundraise 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 two-person 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.
Nivi: 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.
Naval: 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 and 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.
Break Every Rule to Get the Best People
Nivi: 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.
Naval: 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 I’ve 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 are outsourcing to someone else who doesn’t know what rules they can break and what they can’t—they’re 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 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 multidisciplinary, and they have to temporarily don 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: primus inter pares—first among equals—where they’re all peers. But each person, given their expertise and their particular know-how, 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. Another person might be better at electrical engineering or software engineering, or have taste in a different domain. But a great team will have multidisciplinary 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 in operating the company and how it’s structured. Every good company is idiosyncratic. Its culture is unique to it.
You can’t just transplant it.
It Just Takes a Small Group of People to Create Something Great
Naval: 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 to-dos for other people and it takes me five 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 is very low signal and a lot of noise—AKA spam—even well-meaning spam from friends, family, and coworkers.
So we all switched to text messaging, where we understand the barrier to entry is higher. Like, “If you’re going to text me, it’d 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 these large group texts die out over time—because 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 germane 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 it 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 zero 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 II 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 into 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’s 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 maker’s time—builder’s 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. Whereas 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 TikTok-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 slop 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 world-changing products.
Nivi: It reminds me of Nassim 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.
Find Undiscovered Talent Before Everyone Else
Nivi: In July 2025, you tweeted that “The job of a startup is to find undiscovered talent and distill it into a product.”
Naval: 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 Altman stays true to “We’re not just building Sora 2 video feeds; we’re not just building chatbots; 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 a hundred million robots. Tesla is 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’re going to have to hack your way to them.
So to be a great recruiter, you have to first be a great sourcer, and a great sourcer 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.
Great People Have Taste in Other People
Naval: We recently hired an assistant at the company—an office-manager-type person—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 it to a recruiter, you hand it 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 salespeople. Copywriters have taste in 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’d 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.
Nivi: One thing AngelList 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: one-man companies, two-person 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.
Naval: 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 because 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 ancillary benefits to it.
Nivi: Agreed. We opened it because we are in the business of serving founders.
Every Great Engineer Is Also an Artist
Nivi: In August 2025, you tweeted that “Every great engineer is also an artist.”
Naval: I know this experientially, 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.
But 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. World-class artwork—everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art, to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorknobs, 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 flock 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.
Early Teams Look Like Cults
Nivi: 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.
Naval: 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 a 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 mission-oriented, you can’t mix too many different kinds of people.
That’s where the “cult” in culture comes from. Early teams do look like cults. They are monomaniacal; 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.
Nivi: There’s actually an old Quora 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.
You Can’t Make a Product that is Simple Enough
Naval: 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 build are opinionated. Opinionated 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 consumer-land get there through simplicity.
You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots 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 in 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.
ChatGPT 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 the simplest product on 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 TikTok and ChatGPT, 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.
The Founder’s Personality Is the Company
Nivi: Warren Buffett says that you should hire people who have energy, intelligence and integrity. Joel Spolsky put it another way—that you want people who are Smart and Get 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.
Naval: 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 TikTok, 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 self-motivated. 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 to 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 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’s 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. Now 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 the company you build, literally—the founder’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 outwrite 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.
Good Teams Throw Away Far More Product Than They Keep
Nivi: There’s a lot of ways people try to assess whether someone has the ability to create new knowledge. Peter Thiel 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.
Naval: Thiel’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 AngelList investor, likes to say, “non-consensus 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? An iteration is when you do something and then you look at the result; you test the result somehow—ideally against a free market, nature, or physics. Then you ask, “Did this work or not? 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 en masse, 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 then 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 than their organization can execute upon, and there’ll be internal resistance to doing things because nine out of 10 ideas are half-baked.
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.
All New Information Starts as Misinformation
Naval: 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.
Balaji Srinivasan has another way of putting this, which is wandering through the “idea maze.” You’re taking left turns and right turns and backtracking, 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 the 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.”
Nivi: The side effect that you have to be willing to tolerate is that great teams are throwing away most of their work.
Geniuses Only
Nivi: 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.
Naval: 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. 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 can just 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 three, four, five 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.
Nivi: 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.
Naval: 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, because I’ll probably want to invest.”
And that has actually worked out reasonably well in a couple of cases. So you’re right that 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 four in the morning and calling staff meetings at odd hours 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 that themselves.
Practice Your Craft At the Edge of Your Capability
Nivi: 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 AngelList, 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.
Naval: 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 anxiety-inducing, 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 T. 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 sure 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, past 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 slipshod 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.
Nivi: 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.
Naval: 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 rah-rah 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 onto 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.
The Prime Directive: Never Compromise on Talent
Nivi: If I was going to sum up this whole conversation: The prime directive of a startup is to never compromise on recruiting and talent. I would rather take a short-term hit on customer experience than take a short or long-term hit on the quality of the team.
Naval: 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’ll 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 and 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 deluding 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 you find a genius who doesn’t fill any of those capabilities, but is somehow hireable, 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 skillsets 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 multi-hundred or multi-thousand-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 them.