This is a YouTube video titled "This is How Top Founders Recruit Elite AI Talent" containing a discussion between two speakers about strategies for recruiting top AI researchers. The conversation focuses on the challenges and approaches to building long-term, personal relationships with elite talent, emphasizing persistence and unconventional recruiting methods. The content was created in July 2025.
How do you go about trying to have these conversations with these senior members of world class organizations and being like, hey, we have some really cool things. We love the way you think, we love the way you work, or potentially threatening starting a war with other lab or creating awkward situations.
I think you can do it. And I've seen plenty of companies do this. But it's very different from, I think, how traditional recruiting processes look. People want to think recruiting is a thing you do in 20% of your time, a pipeline. I have some people, I'm going to move those people down the pipeline. I don't think that works. If you're a marginal open AI researcher getting paid 20, 25 million dollars a year, the barrier to take you to a startup is really high. You can do it, but it's very different from how traditional recruiting processes look. So the people that I've seen do this really well are relentless about like just calling them for five minutes every week over months. The best recruiter I know, whenever the IMO Math Olympiad results come out, he just calls everyone on that list. You should be spending like 50, 60% of your time recruiting. I send journal articles to hundreds of researchers a week. You have to play these incredibly protracted long games to talent because you will never be the most interesting opportunity. But you can make yourself the most attractive landing spot by building an intense and personal relationship and making that informal as soon as humanly possible.
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