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Grit · 3 min · Sep 21, 2026

A downturn may make recruiting easier

Jesse Zhang reminds the team that recent growth is not a permanent norm because markets move in cycles. He thinks easier recruiting may be a downturn's main upside.

Jesse Zhang is co-founder and CEO of Decagon.

Co-founded Decagon, a conversational AI platform for customer support, and previously founded Lowkey, acquired by Niantic.

Joubin Mirzadegan, Host · Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Took Palo Alto Networks' cloud business from $2M to $50M+ ARR in a year.

About this segment

Jesse Zhang reminds the team that recent growth is not a permanent norm because markets move in cycles. He thinks easier recruiting may be a downturn's main upside.

From “Inside Decagon: Finding PMF, Hiring Fast, and Scaling 10x”, Sep 21, 2026. Watch the full episode

“the only good thing about a downturn may be that it might be easier to just recruit”

Jesse Zhangat 32:55 · Grit32:55

Takeaways

Prepare the team for a change in business conditions while things are going well.
A downturn could ease competition for recruits.
Jesse expects starting a company to remain relatively accessible.

In this episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

31:02
how do i say this you just kind of everyone just kind of assumes like yeah the good times have been good for the last few years you just like it normalizes it just normalizes and that means like customer budget continues to like fall out of the sky that means fundraising continues to like it hasn't been that hard yeah you know i think like probably your team feels that way like it's just growing it's just you know it's growing faster than anything ever yeah you know i don't know i wonder if you like how you relate to that yeah i mean you just want to like uh have a steady mindset across everything right you can't get too high during the highs you can't get too low during the lows so you're always trying to counterbalance like we we say internally all the time that it's not always going to be like this you do and yeah even when we do say it even
31:48
though we say it we also know that like just viscerally like yeah everyone's kind of expecting just constant growth right but most businesses aren't like that like a lot of the one That are now growing fast, grew super fast during Zerp era, and then there was a couple years of roughness, and then now they're growing again. It is cyclical. We want to make sure we're talking about that. We've had very good quarters the last few quarters. When we recap the quarter, we tell everyone, hey, obviously, it's great right now. Everyone should be ready that it's not always going to be so easy.
32:29
So you got to build the toughness right now. You got to build the grit right now. And that's a message we try to make sure we emphasize. Doesn't matter, does it? Yeah. It doesn't matter. We have very few people that have sort of left the company, but we've had a few go start their own companies. and yeah maybe there is a world where like if it ever becomes harder to start your own company like that will happen less but i actually don't think i think even when there's a downturn it'll still be pretty easy to start a company i think the only good thing about a downturn may be that it might be easier to just recruit that's the hope yeah because there's so many companies right now too many yeah and that's like that's a good thing for the world generally but yeah it makes recruiting very difficult and uh it's also really easy to be a founder so a lot of people a lot of
33:28
people at decagon have like a very strong entrepreneurial sense like they were founders before or yeah they want to be founders and so if the barrier to entry is very low then people just do it even if they don't have an idea even if they're not sure if it's the right time yeah i was um we did a debrief on a candidate yesterday and at roadrunner there's a lot of people that that are ambitions to be founders.
33:52
Yeah. They're very spiky.