Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:28:41 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:28:41] S0: If you think about the building of the early team and what it required as two young guys building this company, there's lots of very talented young entrepreneurs out there, maybe for the first time of this scope or magnitude in a long time, all of whom probably could benefit from the lessons that you've learned, getting very sophisticated, talented people to come join you even after careers at the other great companies. If you were teaching this as a class, like here's how to get lead talent when you're young and inexperienced and naive, what would be the syllabus?
00:29:09 · Rob Wachen, Gavin Uberti
[00:29:09] S3: We have a pretty bimodal talent philosophy. It starts with what we call the legends, which is when we're trying to solve an incredibly hard technical problem and generally do something that hasn't been done before, we need to find the very best person in the world. And often, the number one guy in the world versus the number 10 guy versus the number 100 guy, huge difference in whether it's actually possible to solve the problem. We created the system we call project based recruiting, where we map out all of the hardest technical problems across all industries that anyone has ever had to solve. We look at temporality, so who are the people who did the zero to one? Who is in charge, quote unquote? Who actually did the work? We talked to as many people as possible, and then we just track it. And you'd be surprised by the amount of people who say yes after the first conversation is pretty low, but the amount of people who say yes after the twentieth conversation is surprisingly high. You really gotta keep at them. When you hear no from somebody who really is [00:29:58] S1: the best in the world, then that really means, hey, should go ahead and come back when you had a few more milestones proven out. I think it's one of the most convincing things to see is, hey, we make bold claims, and when you go ahead and hit those again and again and again, that is really belief inspiring.
00:30:13 · Rob Wachen
[00:30:13] S3: When we decided we wanted to build a rack and not just a chip, we were looking at this and we're saying, you know, how many products have actually shipped at scale for a rack scale system that actually have the power density that we're trying to solve? And we just kind of said, if we were gonna wave a magic wand, what would the best possible person in the world look like? And we're like, well, if we could find somebody who, like, started at NVIDIA and built the entire Rack team through all their different generations, learned all this different stuff, but is still scrappy, still understands the startup culture, but has seen scale, like, would be the best possible person. So we mapped all of the different teams that related to all of the different Rack Scale products at NVIDIA. And we found three people that we thought could fit the bill. And we talked to all of them, and two of them have just retired. And one of them was planning to do one more generation for NVIDIA and and then retire. His name is Brian. And over time, we convinced him to join. Brian started the HDX and DGX team at NVIDIA, which was, you know, a majority of NVIDIA's revenue, tens of billions of dollars a quarter. And the other two guys ended up investing, by the way. But when you have somebody like that, they just know what good looks like, you know, because they they've seen it. And there's so many times where we'd talk to Brian, he'd just point to us and be that's a billion dollar like, a billion dollar lesson I learned. A billion dollar lesson I learned. Like, yo, that just saves us cycles. And you pair someone like Brian with somebody like Sanford.
00:31:31 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Rob Wachen, Gavin Uberti
[00:31:31] S0: Do have a name for them? So Brian's a legend. What's what's Sanford? [00:31:33] S3: Yeah. We say chips on shoulders put chips in data centers. Yeah. Sanford and Gavin in in high school were world robotics champions and Sanford was finishing his senior year of college. And we called him up a couple years ago and we said, hey, can you come check out what we're doing? We need some help on the platform side. He comes for a week and we say, can you build a cold plate this week? And if you asked, like, any thermal engineer, anything like that, they they would think you're just, like, totally naive. Right? I mean, these things take months to do. And, like, to be clear, they do. But you can make real progress in a week if you if you put your mind to it and you think it's possible. And he built a contraption in a week that, like, actually derisked, like, a pretty key power question we had. And you put those two together, and they've done incredible things. One is not possible without the other because you need the extremely driven people that just keep asking why and don't know where the bodies are buried to, like, take tons of aggressive risks, and then you need the people who've seen scale and still have the startup scrappy mentality to help them along [00:32:32] S0: the way. So it's really the legends plus some naivete, law, first principles type talent. It's not just that you have both in the company, it's that they're working together. [00:32:39] S1: That's right. If I
00:32:39 · Gavin Uberti, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:32:39] S1: That's right. If I [00:32:40] S0: think about that funnel, anything else more interesting to say about how much better you've gotten at recruiting and why those metrics keep getting better? [00:32:47] S1: One of the shocking things is, I wish you being such a contrarian bet, kind of self selects, that, like, if you're the kind of person who is somewhat opportunistic, shouldn't go join whatever the hot company is or rather than go ahead and do deep diligence, you will not come work here, And it's one of the things I worry about as we announce more and more of the product and its specs, we may lose some of this if we're not very careful.
00:32:47 · Gavin Uberti, Rob Wachen
[00:32:47] S1: One of the shocking things is, I wish you being such a contrarian bet, kind of self selects, that, like, if you're the kind of person who is somewhat opportunistic, shouldn't go join whatever the hot company is or rather than go ahead and do deep diligence, you will not come work here, And it's one of the things I worry about as we announce more and more of the product and its specs, we may lose some of this if we're not very careful. [00:33:08] S3: You kind of have to be sick in the head to join our company. When you think about it on paper, it's like you, a person who is probably a very accomplished engineer, making a good amount of money, it's liquid, it's predictable somewhere else, you're going to convince your family to move to San Jose and live in this apartment on this housing program for the semiconductor company run by two, what, twenty four year olds now, that's pre product that is going against the biggest companies in the world and the most supply constrained environment ever created with a design that they're saying is not going to be, like, 10% better, but it's gonna be 10 x better. Something must be wrong with you to do that. People are just wired differently here that they, like, really want to not prove people wrong who don't believe, but prove people right who do believe. They just take it personally. And, you know, that's really fun to find those people. And, frankly, just the nature of the company makes it very easy to whittle out the people who aren't like that.