Talk About Hiring

I’ve been doing a lot of hiring recently: sales, marketing, engineers, operations. And honestly, it took me a while to figure out what I was actually looking for.

I used to think good hiring meant a thorough process. More rounds, more interviewers, more data points. But the more I did it, the more I realized that was mostly just anxiety dressed up as rigor.

YC decides whether to invest in a founding team in 10 minutes. They still ask plenty of questions in that time, but the way they make the final call is interesting. They ask themselves: could this person be the next Mark Zuckerberg? It’s not a question they ask the founder. It’s the internal lens they use to evaluate everything they just heard. And apparently, once you frame it that way, the answer becomes pretty obvious. (link)

Back when I was in VC, we’d make founder assessments after one or two meetings. Not because we were reckless. Because with the right lens, you can learn a lot about a person very quickly. The same is true for hiring.

Two things I actually care about

I’ve landed on two: smart and hungry.

Smart doesn’t mean credentials. It means they think for themselves. They have opinions. They know why they made their past decisions, not just what they did. When you dig into their experience, there’s actual reasoning underneath, not just narrative.

Hungry is trickier. A lot of smart people I’ve met are just… fine with things. They do good work, they clock out, and that’s a totally valid way to live. But it’s not what early-stage startups need. Hungry means they care, about something. They get excited. They go further than asked because they actually want to, not because they’re performing ambition.

Alexandr Wang wrote something similar in a memo to his Scale AI team a few years ago, “hire people who give a shit.” His framing was that he screens for two things: whether someone cares about the mission specifically, and whether they care about their work in general. And the thing he warned about was interesting: as a company grows, it becomes a credential. People apply for the brand, not the substance. Suddenly you have a lot of smart, polished, uninvested people, and that’s how startups quietly die. (link)

I think about that a lot when I’m interviewing someone.

It shows up differently by role

One thing I’ve noticed: for engineers, smart is usually easier to verify. Hard problems leave traces. You can ask what they built, dig into the details, and the signal is pretty clear. What’s harder to find in engineers is energy, someone who’s technically excellent and genuinely cares.

For commercial roles, sales, ops, founder associates, it’s kind of the opposite. Energy is everywhere. Lots of people are enthusiastic and driven. What’s harder to tell is whether they’re actually smart, because they may have never been forced to solve something truly hard end to end.

That’s not a knock on either side. It’s just that different roles attract different default profiles. The rare find in each case is the one who has both.

Questions I actually use

I used to stress about having the right interview structure. Now I mostly just try to have a real conversation and see where it goes. But there are a few things I always come back to:

What are you looking for? This one’s simple but revealing. Did they come in with a real goal, or are they just spraying applications? Self-awareness usually shows up here immediately.

What would your ideal job look like? Not to judge the answer, but to see if they’ve actually thought about it. People with a point of view about their own career tend to have a point of view about their work too.

Walk me through your career decisions. All of them. Every pivot, every transition. I’m not looking for a good story. I’m trying to understand how they think. The reasoning behind their choices tells me more than the choices themselves.

How do you define success in your last role? Do they have standards? Did they care about being good at it, or just getting through it? There’s usually a clear difference in how people answer this.

What’s the hardest problem you’ve solved? I follow up on this one a lot. If the answer sounds easy, it probably was. Real difficulty shows up in the details: the dead ends, the moments where they didn’t know what to do and had to figure it out anyway.

What are you most proud of? What people choose to be proud of says a lot about what they actually value.

What’s a truth you hold that most people disagree with? Peter Thiel’s question. I like it because it’s genuinely hard to answer well. I’m not looking for the “right” answer. I just want to see if they can think originally and hold a position.

The question I ask myself

After all the conversations, I’ve found the clearest signal is the one I ask myself after the interview:

Could this person become one of the best I’ve ever seen in this role?

It’s borrowed from how YC thinks about founders. They’re not asking “is this a reasonable bet?” They’re asking if there’s a version of this person who becomes exceptional. The question forces honesty. When I’ve settled for “good enough,” I’ve usually regretted it.

If the answer isn’t a clear yes, I’ve learned it’s better to keep looking. Not because anyone is bad. Just because at early-stage companies, the cost of a mediocre hire is real. You can always find more candidates. What’s harder to undo is the drag of someone who’s capable but not really in it.

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I’m still figuring this out, honestly. Every hiring cycle teaches me something new. But the core of it: smart, hungry, and someone who actually gives a shit, that part I’m pretty sure about.

These are things I’ve noticed from hiring across sales, marketing, ops, and engineering. Happy to hear how others think about it.

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