Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. Interesting. Okay, I want to talk about hiring, you talked a bit about this. You're starting a company again, what are some of the key lessons you've learned from your time at Palantir when you are hiring people for your company? I don't know if you're actually hiring people yet, maybe when you may start hiring. Yeah, we have six people at the moment, so a really reasonably small team. I think with hiring, it's funny, man, there's so much hiring advice online and you read it and you're like, "Yeah, this is super obvious." And then when you live it, you're suddenly like, "Aah, this is why people say this." So a few simple examples are I think the thing that is really hard to find is somebody who really, really has a lot about doing the thing and will go that kind of extra 20%. I think when you hire out, especially not to pick on them, but I think if you hired a [inaudible 01:00:17] right, it's like people want a 400K a year job, they would like to work a certain number of hours, they would like to ship some code and then go home, that's basically the model that you get accustomed to even if you don't intend to when you work at a big company. And so if you hire out of that for a really small startup, it can be really challenging because a lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like, "No, I'm really going to, I'm work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working, and I'm not just going to check my boxes, I'm actually going to look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve." And everything I'm saying feels kind of obvious, but when you actually feel that difference between somebody who's just checking the boxes and somebody who's kind of an animal in this way, they'll actually go and pursue and accomplish the end outcome, that difference is very, very big and it matters so much for your first 20 people. And there's no science to finding these people. It's not like you can just put somebody who cares about outcomes in your JD and then suddenly you'll get all these people applying. So then it's like, okay, well how do you screen for that and how do you find those types of people? And so that's where it gets really interesting. I think that's where the mission alignment comes in, and so you do have to find people who, for what you are doing, have this extra maybe private reason to care about it a little bit more than the average person. So I think for Palantir, they did hire a lot of vets, for example, or maybe people who were a little bit more patriotic or pro-America than the average tech employee, and those people had an extra reason to Palantir and an extra reason to try that little bit harder. And so what I'm doing is a little bit more in the kind of medical and health space, and so I think people who have themselves had experiences with this system have maybe had relatives go through difficult experiences with things like cancer or whatever it is. They're just that extra bit motivated to really care about the thing you're trying to do and then work that little bit harder, and so I think aggressively filtering early on to things like mission fit, how much have you cared about stuff in the past, and what's an example.…

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