Nick Turley: preference

Transcript context

…So you talked about this kind of collaboration between researchers and product people. And you've been at the beginning of ChatGPT from day one to today, from zero to 700 million weekly active users. Not just registered users, weekly active users. How have you approached building out that team over time? One of the other inheritances of being in a research lab is that you take recruiting really seriously. That's something that AI labs know every person matters. But many tech companies that go through hyper growth and they kind of lose their identity, they lose their talent bars, they just have chaos. So we've always had this tendency to run relatively lean. So it is a small team that is running ChatGPT. I take co inspiration from WhatsApp where it was a very small team running a very global-scale product. And then more importantly, you have to treat hiring a little bit more like executive recruiting and less like just pure pipeline recruiting where you really need to understand what is the gap you're trying to fill on each team, what is the specific skill set and how do you fill it. To give you an example, I'm a product person at heart, but sometimes a team doesn't need a product person because there's already someone doing that role. In many cases, we have a really talented engineering leader who has amazing product sense, or we have a researcher who has product ideas. And in my mind they can play that role. And maybe we have something else missing instead. Maybe we need a little bit more front-end or something like that. In other cases, maybe what you're missing is incredible data scientists. So I really like to go through every single team and figure out what is the skill sets that that team needs and how do you put it together from principles rather than just assuming, "Hey, we're going to do a bunch of pipeline recruiting for all these different roles" and then people will find a team later. So I think that's always felt really important to me. And it's the way that you keep your team really small, yet super high throughput. It also allows you to hire people who I think Keith Rabois calls us like barrels, I think. [inaudible 01:07:15] barrel's an ammunition where he thinks... I think this comes from him, but the idea being that sort of the throughput of your org depends on how many barrels you have, which is people who can make stuff happen. And then you can add ammunition around them, which is people helping those people. I think that's been really true for our recruiting too where we try to maximize the number of empowered people who can ship because that's how you have a small team and still get the ton done. So there's a couple of things, and I spent a lot of time on vibes too with each team because I think one of the things that is challenging when you try to do research and product together is that the cultures are different. People have different backgrounds. And I think to make that go super well, you need to spend time team building and making sure that people have a huge amount of trust for each other's skill sets, feel like they can think across their boundaries. I really believe that product is everyone's job, for example. And for that reason, the recruiting doesn't stop when the people are on the door. sets, feel like they can think across their boundaries. I really believe that product is everyone's job, for example. And for that reason, the recruiting doesn't stop when the people are on the door. It actually starts because you have to start making the teams awesome.…

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