Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a few components there, one definitely this bigger than life mission and really believing it. Every other sentence is about Mars, really believing it. It doesn’t really matter what anybody else, the criticism, anything, there’s a very singular focused big mission. But I think it also has to do a bunch of the other components like being able to hire well once the people, once wants to beacon attracts. And I’ve just seen people that don’t necessarily on paper have a resume with a track record, I’ve seen who now turned out to be legendary people who basically tosses on the ball of leadership, sees something in them and says and gives them the ownership and they run with it and that happens at every scale that, there’s a real meritocracy. And there’s just you could see the flourishing of human intellect in these meetings, in these group getting together where the energy is palpable. It’s exciting for me to just be around that because there’s not many companies I’ve seen that in because, when a company becomes successful and larger, it somehow suffocates that energy that, I guess, you see in start-ups at the early stages but it’s cool to see it at a large company that’s actually able to achieve scale. I think part of the secret there is that Elon actually knows things and, when you know things, you can evaluate the quality of work products. And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who’s full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars and you can fire the people who is full of shit and you can bet on the people who’ll get us to Mars. That capacity to directly evaluate the competency of individuals is actually a little bit rare. It’s not widely distributed amongst managers, hiring managers. It’s not something you can easily delegate to people who are not very skilled at the work itself. And Elon obviously knows a lot about a lot and he can smell who knows stuff for real. And is this, at our tiny scale, something I’ve tried to do in the same order where, when we hire programmers, for example, it’s going to be interesting now with AI as the new challenge, but up until this point, the main pivot point for getting hired was not your resume, was not the schooling you’ve had, it was not your grades, it was not your pedigree, it was how well you did on two things. A, your cover letter because I can only work with people remotely if they’re good writers. So, if you can’t pen a proper cover letter and can’t bother to put in the effort to write it specifically for us, you’re out. Two, you have to be able to program really well to the degree that I can look at your code and go like, “Yeah, I want to work with that person.” Not only I want to work with that person, I want to work on that person’s code when I have to see it again in five years to fix some damn bug. So, we’re going to give you a programming test that simulates the way we work for real and we’re going to see how you do. And I’ve been surprised time and again where I thought for sure this candidate is a shoe-in, they sound just right, the CV is just right and then you see the code getting turned in and I’m like, “No way. No way are we hiring this person.” And the other way has been true as well. I’d go like, “I don’t know about this guy or this woman Eeh, I don’t know.” and then they turn in their code stuff and I’m like, “Holy shit, can that person be on my team tomorrow preferably?” The capacity to evaluate work product is a superpower when it comes to hiring. There’s a step that I’ve seen Elon do really well which is be able to show up and say this can be done simpler.…

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