Varun Mohan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Parallel processing, memory, hard drives, internet, things like that. And then there's just problem solving skills, being able to solve interesting problems. Is there any other skills you think people should be investing more in with the rise of AI building more and more of our products? I think one of the things that's maybe a little bit undervalued is this kind of agency piece. And I think about this a lot, which is, you have a lot of people that could go through college and go through school and they're basically told exactly what to do on a P-set. They're given these very, very, I would say, well-defined paths that they need to take. I think maybe in society and just school, we don't prioritize how do you make sure you get people with real agency that want to build something, right? Their goal is not just to maybe graduate from college and then get a job at a big tech company where they're told exactly what to do or where to put the pixel for this one website. I think that's maybe a skill set that is undervalued just right now, probably in the last maybe 10 years or so. And I think that's going to be really, really important. For a startup, obviously these are skills that we just look for. We look for people that are really high agency because we just recognize that by default, if we don't innovate and do crazy things, we're going to die. The company is just going to die. So we just look for this, right? But I would say for most software engineering jobs, that's probably not the case. Just think about big company X and what they're hiring for on the average software engineering interview. It probably doesn't look like that. I love how you phrased that. If we don't do crazy things and innovate, we're going to die. That would be a great title for this podcast episode. And I think, I know, it's 100% true. There's just a lot of crazy things happening and a lot of innovation happening. And if you can't keep up, you'll die. So let's talk about hiring. You have a really interesting approach to hiring. There's a few questions I have here. One is just how do you... I know you try to stay really lean. That's a common theme across all the AI startups these days. How do you know when it's time to hire someone?…

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