Continue's Ty Dunn on Hiring for the Future of AI

You were an engineer, then a product manager, and now you're a founder building one of the fastest growing AI coding tools in the market. How do you hire for a team that is building on the edge of what's possible.

You first evaluate culture, fit and values. You got to be able to build trust. That has to be the foundation of what you're doing in order to do anything with the team, to kind of center around yourselves, around a shared idea, which is what a startup is. It's a group of people focused on a shared idea. And, and so that's the foundation. If you can get that, that's the first thing. The next thing, it's then about actually finding people who are super excited and enthusiastic to actually take our tool Continue and apply it in their day to day workflows to go and set up continuous AI workflows using Continue's new cli. People who will dog food, or at our company, we call it, eat our own pizza because generally we don't want to eat dog food as human. We end up in a place that we want people who really are using it. And that's kind of the basis for building an amazing developer experience is like first for yourself, making sure that it's great. Then our engineers also interact with our community, making sure that they're, they're kind of building that empathy and having that relationship. So it goes beyond kind of the hard skills of how good of a technical engineer they are, but also the soft skills of how do they communicate, how do they work with the community, how do they work with the rest of the team. Those are the two main pieces that I would say are most important when we think about team team building and in this situation.