Scaling Europe
00:13:48 · Matt Wilson, Sebastian Johnson
It it it forces us to make sure that we are, you know, living out what we what we say as we wanna build the most contents company in Europe. And if we don't feel amazing about paying, you know, top dollar for the staff that we bring in, particularly the engineering staff that we bring in, then, you know, there's something wrong and we're not we're not at that at that bar. [00:14:09] S0: And how do you, I guess, balance people who are coming for the highest salaries with also wanting to solve the mission? You know, there's been this sort of meme on social media about Anthropic and their interview process asking, like, you know, if the stock went to zero, would you still work for us? Sure. As a... Do you feel like there's a tension between paying too much and getting people who are just in it for the money, or do you... Yeah. How do you balance that with getting people who are also interested in the mission of the company and building something very powerful?
00:14:33 · Matt Wilson
[00:14:33] S1: I think you have to treat the interview process and getting to know people as a as as a full package. But, you know, everybody's got different financial circumstances in their life, and I don't... I'd... We... We've got people that will take, you know, a 30% cash, 70% equity with with... As part of that, we've got people that will take 5% equity, 95% cash. So we see a full spectrum. It depends entirely on individual circumstances, and we think we should not be paternalistic about that. We should... You know, if we wanted to raise more money, we could raise more money. If we wanted to raise less money and give away more equity, we could do that. So I think, you know, we we view that... Kinda wanna push this trade off onto the employees and have them manage their own personal financial circumstances rather than have that be, you know, opinionated from the company side as to what they should be. And and and then I think it also comes into the types of people that you hire and what they've done before. You know, we hire two thirds of our team are ex founders. So you're not going... You're not getting people that are incredibly mercenary. You're getting people that want to be part of something huge, want to be part of something... Of of of a winning team, and want to be part of a of of a massive mission in, you know, changing the world for for better, which which is the kind of core of how we think about Jack and Jill.
00:15:51 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:15:51] S0: And the people that you're targeting must be, as you say, like, the very best of the best. There are increasing number of American companies that are expanding, particularly into London. We've seen it with OpenAI and Anthropic and a bunch of US companies coming in, and some of these salaries are £600,000 that Anthropic is paying. Have you seen... You know, you sit in this place where you've got, imagine, access to amazing data. Are you seeing that have a knock on impact on the rest of the salaries? Has that played a role in you increasing the salaries in in your own company?
00:16:21 · Matt Wilson
[00:16:21] S1: Yeah. I I wouldn't say as as direct as as as seeing Anthropic coming and offering a salary at the... Then for... That then has caused us to then change our compensation approach. But, obviously, we are, you know, playing in a market, and we wanna make sure that we're really competitive for the best people. But the the best people have always had, you know, tons of options. Anybody in our team could go and move to The States and go and work for a company out in San Francisco and earn the wages that have been possible out there, which are higher than what Central Opics gain in London. They could go and be a founder and raise millions of dollars on on day zero of a company and and go and and, you know, plot their own path. So it's not about just one... It's not just just about the labs. It's about the kind of whole universe of other opportunities that people have got, that we've got to make sure that we are... That we're competitive with when we think about the types of people that we want to bring into the team and the type of partners that we want to bring. I think in terms of the rest of the market, there is a, at the moment, a little bit of a bifurcation that's happening in the in the market where you're seeing, you know, well funded companies and and and and, you know, this includes the American companies. Seeing the returns to talent density and then, you know, rationally thinking, okay, if people are gonna be 10 times more productive and we can be incredibly talent dense, like, we should be willing to pay more to attract the best people. And and... But at the same time, you've then got... I think that's that's a tiny fraction of the overall labor market, a tiny fraction of what's what's out there. And we work on both sides of that. So we work with a lot of the American companies that are expanding into London, helping them build out their initial teams out here. And so so we we we work with them. We benefit from them that, you know, candidates that are working with Jack are exposed to those opportunities through working with us. But we also work with a whole bunch of other companies across, you know, the kind of full spectrum of the economy, not just, you know, hot AI companies.
00:18:11 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:18:11] S0: Yeah. It's really interesting. Going back to, I guess, the the sellers that you're paying for engineers, we're we're in this incredible... We're seeing this incredible demand for these top tier 10 x engineers, whatever that... You know, whatever they really are or or look like. What's the... What's kind of the the standout traits you think? You know, I know that you hire a lot of ex founders. Yeah. What is it about maybe ex founders or these engineers that you think really makes them phenomenal at what they do?
00:18:38 · Matt Wilson
[00:18:38] S1: I think it's, know, think about the job having kind of compressed down from large elements of what a product manager would do, what designers would do, what what you do with with DevOps, what you do in engineering, like the collapsing of all of those into a single person, making sure that that person has to be excellent commercially, really deeply understand the business, be really deeply thoughtful about about products, and and be able to go and talk to customers and understand the customer impact of whatever they're building, and be able to take something that's much more ambiguous than maybe a few years ago, you'd have requirements broken down by somebody else and then handed over to an engineer. You're saying, actually, you're gonna go way way further up in the abstraction layer, and you've gotta be able to work at that abstraction layer, work with customers, deal with all of the deal deal with all of the traditional elements of of of products, have really good design taste to be really thoughtful about that. Plus, be at the forefront of how to be an engineer that's using AI to be as productive as possible and how to be working with building AI agents and building AI enabled systems as well. So, you know, all of those three things together is just, like, a very, very rare combination. And, yeah, we we tend to find that people that have been founders have... And have been... You know, the founding CTO, this had to go and figure something out for the first time, had to go and work with customers. This had to be really commercial and think about building the business as well as building the products and doing the engineering work behind that, that they tend to have, you know, a a a really kind of strong mix of these skills across the board.