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Published · transcript-backed

Sam Bankman-Fried: belief

15 Dec 2021 Acquired FTX (with Sam Bankman-Fried & Mario Gabriele)

“A lot of this is something that you have to figure out over time. But I think a lot of this is like, you put someone in an uncertain messy situation where there's no obvious right answer.”

— Sam Bankman-Fried

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Sam Bankman-Fried
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
15 Dec 2021
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…Sam, we talked a little bit earlier about over-hiring and the risk of that. Something that I've always been curious about, given the amount of leverage you guys seem to have managed to extract from a very small team is, what do you look for when you are hiring folks? You personally or the team, are there certain things that just stand out to you as this is someone that I think can hang at the velocity that we operate at? It's so hard when you're interviewed, frankly, to do this. A lot of this is something that you have to figure out over time. But I think a lot of this is like, you put someone in an uncertain messy situation where there's no obvious right answer. There's no like, well, yeah, you do this and it's going to go well type of thing. You see how that goes, and you just frankly continue to stress the situation a bit, make the situation messier and messier, and see if they just continue to roll with it and be like, all right, yeah, it got a bit messy or whatever. Make another informed decision here, this is a new situation, I'll do the best I can, and it's not going to be perfect; or whether eventually, they just shut down and be like, this is too messy. There are just no good answers here. What you have to say is, okay, then choose a bad one. You say there are no good answers here. That doesn't mean there's not a best answer. So it sounds like one of the selections then is people comfortable with limited changing information and that are happy to, in absence of certainty, commit to some path.…

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