Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:06:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:06:37] S0: Cursor is actually such a great example of exactly what you're describing because it feels like throughout the entire history of Cursor, it was always just like, how are they going to survive? There's these model companies building these things, the IDs. People are moving away from IDs. And it's been incredible to watch Cursor execute and get ahead of each of these shifts whenever people doubt that there's an opportunity here and it just keeps growing and killing it. [01:07:00] S1: I mean, it's not too long ago it was like tab auto complete on it. And now we're in a fully cloud agents. But just remember the time span is months. The condensed nature of this is just wild. [01:07:15] S0: I came to the office at one point and I got a tab button and now it's just no longer even a thing. [01:07:20] S1: Yeah, now it's just cute. Yeah, now it's just on the shelf. Yeah. [01:07:23] S0: Now just talk. Something that one of your colleagues wanted me to ask you is just what is it like to work with an exec team who truly believes recruiting is the most important thing?
01:07:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:07:23] S0: Now just talk. Something that one of your colleagues wanted me to ask you is just what is it like to work with an exec team who truly believes recruiting is the most important thing? [01:07:31] S1: It's a gift and at times incredibly frustrating. So the gift part of it is imagine that how much they care. Trying to convince a founder to go have a conversation or to do anything recruiting like, that is not a problem here. And we've all worked with companies where you're trying to pull them in to things. So it's a true gift. The challenge is they're in your shit. They're in it. They understand it. The Cursor team hired their first 80 people, roughly 80 people on their own. They know how to do it. They know how hard it is, which is great, but also they love it and they're in it and they want to do it. And so there can be zero ego about this of who has what piece and it's an all hands on deck. And so sometimes that can be confusing on whose doing things and things that you find out about things after the fact that happened. But I will take that every day. That is extremely net positive, but there's always a counterbalance to such an advantage like that. [01:08:42] S0: So interesting. That's like CPOs often are frustrated for that reason where the founders are always in their shit deciding. [01:08:49] S1: But they care. I'll take the effort and care with that tax any day. [01:08:54] S0: I know one of your hot takes is that the recruiting team should be the highest paid team within the company.
01:08:54 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:08:54] S0: I know one of your hot takes is that the recruiting team should be the highest paid team within the company. [01:09:00] S1: And one of them. Yeah, if not. I mean, if you think about this- In one of them. Yeah, if not. I mean, if you think about this impact that they're having, and I feel like there's a supply and demand crisis around really strategic recruiters because of the somewhat transactional nature we've made recruiting over time. And so I just think there's a really small supply of recruiters who can function at this level and at this approach and style. And so like any other labor market, it's a cost of labor thing and there's just very few of it. And so we think that they have tremendous impact, but it's a really rare skillset. [01:09:43] S0: Something I wanted to ask you that I forgot to ask is, we talk a lot about talent and density. How much of it is about the person specifically versus the team that you assemble around them?
01:09:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:09:43] S0: Something I wanted to ask you that I forgot to ask is, we talk a lot about talent and density. How much of it is about the person specifically versus the team that you assemble around them? [01:09:54] S1: Yeah. I feel like where companies overly focus is an individual, and unless they are a team of one, it's actually, if you think about amazing leadership and amazing managers, they're actually quite great puzzle builders. And they think about building these teams that are complimentary together and then help them excel. And so talent density is not a single piece, unless the numerator and denominator are both one. But that's not the case. Often this is one over how many people. And so talent density is actually a collective nature of individuals and humans. But we often, because you are recruiting one human at a time, I think sometimes we get overly focused on that specific 10Xer thing. And actually, I like to think a little bit more around exponential around 10X of a team versus an individual. I don't think you can have a 10X person on a bad team. It just doesn't exist. I used to think when we were at my last company, we can't be a great service provider if we don't have a great client. There's just a bar there. And similarly, a person that might be excellent is going to be throttled if they're not on a strong and supportive team. [01:11:16] S0: That makes sense to me. Okay. I'm going to ask you a bunch of random questions. [01:11:20] S1: Okay.
01:11:20 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:11:20] S1: Okay. [01:11:21] S0: Again, I think people are going to be hearing this and be like, "I need Adam immediately. We need help." And they're not going to be able to get that, because you've got a job. So I'm going to try to extract as much as I can while we're here. One is, say you're an early stage company thinking about hiring, setting up your hiring approach, what's the most common ways that early stage companies and founders f-up their early team in hiring?
01:11:43 · Adam Ward
[01:11:43] S1: Yeah. I think the thing they try to do is do this silver bullet hire, which is a first head of talent, and they collapse two competing skill sets into one. Okay. So generally, as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first recruiter, you're probably behind on hiring. There's a problem to solve there, you're behind on hiring. So maybe there's a debt of roles to fill, five, 10, 15. But you also are hiring someone at this stage because you want them to build a system. They might be like, "Wow, I want to build something like Adam's talking about." So you're trying to build this, hire someone who can also put in the right pieces to help scale out. And those are competing interests, because a person wants to come in and like just any new hire, they want to prove out, they want to make hires, but they might not put in the system. Or they might put in the system, but not make any hires, and now you're not [inaudible 01:12:41]. And so they try to collapse this into one role, and generally that's a mistake. And so we recommend decoupling those things. So that means you still might hire one person, but can you get some help with the other one? I'm going to hire the person who's going to put in the right system, but I'm going to partner them with a contingent recruiter or something else to make some short-term progress while they're in to teach the company how to do this through these roles that they feel that they're helping orchestrate, or vice versa, I might bring in someone to help us put in the right foundation, which we did at GBD. And then they could hire a really high-powered IC recruiter who can execute.