Scott Wu (speaking in a YouTube video hosted by Lenny Rachitsky) emphasizes aggressively pursuing top talent. He tells an anecdote about interviewing a highly promising junior from MIT, then flying to North Carolina to meet the candidate's parents, negotiating a plan that let the student work nearly full-time while attending only required classes so he could still graduate.
Chapters
Everyone always says you should hire great people, but I think that the truth within that truth is basically like, you should fight to all ends, basically, to get the folks that you really want to bring in. We had a candidate who came and interviewed. He was a Jr. At MIT, so he was very, very young. And we gave him our interview. He did way better than almost any of the full time candidates that we had ever talked to. And so we said, hey, you know, what do you think about taking some time off of school and working with us and building out Devon? And he thought about it for a while and he came back, he said, I'm down, I want to do it, but my parents really want me to graduate from school, and I'm just not sure there's a way to make it work. And so, so we talked to him more and kind of just understood the situation. And then we flew to North Carolina, went straight from the airport to his parents house, had dinner with him and his parents, and tried to understand our aids, like, what would it take and what will we need to make work? They just said, it sounds like a great opportunity, but we really want our son to be able to graduate. We figured out a setup basically, where he could work for us essentially full time, but then come in for his required classes and do what he needed to do to get the diploma, basically, but no more than that. We got to a point where everyone was happy with that and then went straight back to the air, flew right back, basically.
