Thoughts on recruiting

this was a telegram message i sent to a friend after listening to naval's recruiting podcast

i believe there's another way to approach team building and product management.

there are some common methods that everyone blindly follows, which leads to:

• hustle culture values how much you work over the results. you're cracked if you work from dawn to dusk, even if you're producing AI slop.

• constant distractions and almost no deep work, with random meetings & interruptions from slack/discord/emails/etc which makes it nearly impossible to do any creative work.

• people try to look smart and competent instead of being willing to admit they don't know something to actually learn and become competent. more effort is put into look sharp rather than becoming sharp.

for example, i think any slack-ish communication should be forbidden. you literally have a tool in your hand that can distract the entire team just because you want to talk to a particular person. If you DM them, then management might think you aren't working hard enough because you aren't loud enough in the chat

i think this system naturally arose because it gives management the "feeling" that they have control over the team. people naturally seek control & if you are a regular person and you hire someone to work for you, you naturally want to know what the other person is doing because you are paying them.

on the other hand, no one wants to be controlled. as soon as you feel like someone is watching over your shoulder, the work will feel like a burden

to be clear, my argument is not about whether the playbook works or not. i think there are enough examples of both. i've seen profitable businesses with one or all of the above characteristics.

BUT i can argue that if you're somewhat more intelligent, what if you view hiring/recruiting as sponsorship?

let's say you don't want to build the next amazon or facebook, but you still want to do "great work" ( https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html )

and you need people to help you to get there ...

so instead of trying to "find" and "hire" people, you dive DEEEEP into the topic, get involved in communities, and interact with people who share the same interests/values and goals as you.

from there, once you decide you want this person on your team, you view "hiring" as "sponsorship"

you give them the assets and money they need and do your best to enable them to do great work in the same arena you want to fight in

all because you care about the "cause" and you happen to find someone who cares about the same cause

moving in the opposite direction of control, giving absolute freedom to intelligent people to do cool shit

the prerequisite for this is to find a way to automate making enough money so you don't mind donating $5k to someone you like and think has potential, and see how they use the assets you gave em and what they’ll do with it

i think i can build a structure around this, so it won't be like "giving away" money. you want to build the team and also have a proper vision and direction

i think if you are competent and smart & you enjoy what you are working on, then you always want to show other people what you are working on, even if they don't ask

so what if, in a team, instead of asking people to explain what they are working on or proving that they are working, you ask them to show you what they have built, or even better, let em naturally show or explain to you what they've been working on?

of course you can't build a team to do marketing with this approach, but i think this could be a very special and unique group of people who are actually capable of doing very innovative and new things

if you want to make it work, you should have 0 financial interests in it & consider the money is gone forever, but the outcome matters

like what if you donate $10k to someone to build the coolest laser gun they can with it?

just because you want to see a cool laser gun, and you believe the person is someone who can get the job done

it may sound stupid, but it makes me feel the excitement

also this is probaby what angel investors are doing