Small labs attract talent by offering meaningful ownership

Transcript

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

1. 20:27

   Yeah. One thing I'm curious about, especially when it comes to new neolabs, is how do you actually get talent? You're now part of the AI talent wars. And it seems like from what you shared, you guys have a lot of breakthroughs when it comes to new types of algorithms, new type of technological breakthroughs. Where are you finding talent from? A couple places. I think the first thing to know about flapping airplanes is that flapping airplanes is a place for people who believe in themselves.

2. 20:51

   This sounds kind of corny, but really, when people interview with us, we counter sell them a ton. Because, like, frankly, if they want to go work at OpenAire Anthropic, they should go do that. Like, you should go to Flapping Airplanes if you want to be part of the last age in human history where you can do research. And it's actually really easy to go into a big org and just go hide under the floorboards.

3. 21:06

   It's really easy to go into the big org and be like, okay, I contributed to that. And realistically, you had an incredibly small business impact. At Flapping Airplanes, oh, you own this thing that's really, really important. You know, this project will live or die on your success and a lot is demanded of you. And so you kind of have to have this entrepreneurial spirit. This kind of gets into the process of maybe with Ben where he's incubated so many great companies like, you know, Mercore, Etch, Cursor, et cetera, that it attracts these people who look out in the world with these hungry eyes like, man, I want to go and change things.

4. 21:32

   I believe in myself. I want my work to be highly, highly visible. They believe in themselves. If they think that they're differentially important, then it shouldn't be part of this big monolith necessarily where their work matters less. And of course, I have lots of friends who actually do really important work at these places and drive the frontier and all that. But it's a harder story for a lot of people.

5. 21:47

   I also think that we have the privilege of having many, many very smart friends. And our friends have very many smart friends. And their friends have very many smart friends. And we also are willing to bet on different kinds of people. Like, we've had some people inbound us who are very radically different. Like, a Clash of Clans world champion. If you interview, you're like, holy crap, this guy is really, really smart.

6. 22:03

   Yeah, I mean, like, I think if you're a world champion at, like, a highly competitive thing, like, you have to be, like, really extremely good. Especially if it's a strategy game. I mean, like, this is how... The story of how we became really good is incredible. And I wish I could tell it to you, but it might cause him to be investigated by several authorities. I mean, it's like one of the reasons why a lot of people hire from like the MIT battle code winners, right?

7. 22:26

   Like if you're insanely good and competitive there, you're probably good in a bunch of other areas too. Yeah. It's just an unfakeable signal of aptitude. Absolutely. Yeah. But even lots of spiritual signals are not necessarily good. For example, we have lots of IMO medalists, but also lots of IMO medalists are maybe not the best machine learning people. We really want, like, diversion thinkers, people who are willing to go and work incredibly hard to make a differential change in the world and believe that they can actually do that.

8. 22:49

   And there's a small group of people, really, who has that set of criteria. Yeah, yeah. I know we're on time.