Naval Ravikant on how a startup can build a great recruiting pipeline

The high level tips are number one, of course, you got to build a great pipeline. Your best pipeline is going to come from your personal contacts and you literally have to forcibly sit down with everyone in the company and say, tell me the 10 best people you've ever worked with or gone to school with and I don't care what they're doing now. I don't care if they're getting their PhD, I don't care if they're starting their own company, I don't care if they just joined Google a month ago. You get those 10 best people and then you just pound the pavement and you have lunch, coffee, breakfast, dinner, whatever with each of them and even if they are not available for recruiting, they're going to give you a few people, demand three people from them, keep in touch, because when they come loose, you want them thinking of you. Then as a secondary source, I would use angel as talent because we actually have lots of companies on there that are in your space that have built keyboards and failed. So go find those people, they exist. You can search for those companies by what they've done. Go look for Android companies that have failed. So that might be a good way to find people. The next thing I would do is because you're a small company, the way you're going to attract people is by your mission. So for example, I remember one of the interesting things about your product being that it can help blind people type very quickly. And so if you have people you know, if you find people who have encountered that issue or have loved ones who have encountered that issue, your mission will resonate much more with them. So you're going to be able to appeal to those people. You're also going to have a unique advantage pulling people out of universities who have done image recognition or spatial recognition work. Those people still are not fully valued, right? Some of them might just be doing normal jobs, normal engineering jobs, but may have a special affinity for what you're doing in terms of the actual hacks in the process. Let's say you have a funnel, you have a pipeline. I would hire an in house recruiter, someone who will bring people in, funnel them through, put them in a schedule. I would incent that person. Every time you make a successful internal hire, that person gets a bonus so that they're highly driven to make sure the process happens because as founders, engineers, we all get busy. So this person will make sure that they flow through the pipeline. You have to decide very fast if you have someone in the office more than two or three times and you don't have an offer in their hand by the time they're done with that process. If you're taking weeks to decide, you always lose them in this environment. One thing that we decided to do internally is we move from a consensus driven system where everybody has to agree and everybody chimes in, to a champion challenger system. So, so basically the problem with everyone agreeing is you get committee, you get bureaucratic group think, you get everyone checking the boxes. No one gets really excited, no one feels responsible. The way the champion system looks like the champion veto system is anyone who met with a person can say, I really like that person, I want to hire them, I'm championing them. That's good enough to make an offer unless somebody else in the recruiting says, I'm going to veto that person. So basically even one champion will pull the person in, but even one veto will get them out. But these are both high order things. So you only bring in people that at least someone is really excited about. You only reject people when someone's really unhappy about it. And you just don't allow lukewarm motivations to either result in a hire or letting someone go. And then finally, the last thing is, no matter how good you are in recruiting, interviewing skills are orthogonal to actual execution skills. There are people who interview really well but can't execute. There are people who execute really well but can't interview. And so you just have to realize that half the people you pull in are not going to fit. And especially for your first few people, this is the DNA of your company. Everything and everyone you build, everything you build after this will be an extension of these people. There will come a point where you're no longer coding, where you lose connection with the product and it will all be up to these people. And so your first five, 10 hires are critically, critically important. So I would give them a lot of stock, I would make them late founders these days, great person giving them 1, 2, 3% of the company. Especially before your product market fit is not unusual even for engineers, not just for so called VP types. You know, keep it flat, keep it meritocratic, keep it small, be generous with the equity, but be quick to fire. So if someone's not working out, you know, get them out the door as quickly as possible. Longer term, once you're past 10 to 15 people, you even lose control of recruiting. So the people you have recruited are doing the recruiting. And so if you have any weak links in the system, then they'll just deteriorate from there. So that's kind of my thinking on it. It's very high level, but feel free to dive in with any more questions or thoughts.