In this interview, Marco Zappacosta discusses how his company’s hiring approach has evolved as the organization grew. In the early days, hiring was driven by personal networks and a simple heuristic: recruit the smartest, hardest‑working people the founders knew, often drawing from a shared high‑school background. As the firm secured larger funding rounds and scaled beyond its first dozen or so employees, the process became more systematic. The team began to explicitly enumerate role‑specific skills and attributes, recognizing that hiring merely for raw intelligence could miss critical competencies. A subsequent error emerged when highly capable candidates clashed with the company’s culture, pace, or expectations. The final stage of the strategy focuses on balancing hyper‑capability with cultural fit, aiming to find individuals who both excel in the required role and align with the organization’s operating style, thereby unlocking maximal impact.
Chapters
Thanks, Mike, and thanks so much, Marco, for sharing some of your journey and the insights. So I had a question around hiring. So, you know, as the company's grown and the team has grown as well, can you share some of the strategies that you've used for building highly effective teams? And maybe if any of those strategies have changed kind of as you've gone through those eras that you were describing from like, you know, the dark ages to kind of now in the journey.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's changed a lot. Early days, I think the main heuristic was like trying to hire the smartest, hardworking people we knew. And, you know, we had very little experience. So those people tended to also have very little experience. But, you know, I think our strategy was successful. Sanders, my co-founder, went to a magnet high school in Northern Virginia. And I believe at one point out of the like, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 people at the company, 4 or 5 of them had gone to this sort of science and technology high school in Northern Virginia. And yeah, we sort of deliberately went after the people we kind of knew who we thought were smart and obviously who were also interested in what we were doing or showed some likelihood to want to come over. And that I think stays true for your first probably like I don't know, dozen, 20-ish people where you're not taking what you can get, but the truth is you do not have your pick of the litter. And so instead you're really relying on your personal network and your personal connection to go recruit the most talented people, you know? And I think once you get to sort of more scale, and so whether that's kind of a big pre-seed round or you're a Series A, and you start to be sort of more established, I think that's when you're really beginning to hire more at scale. And through that, you can be more systematic about the process. And, you know, I think there've been different types of errors that we've made and I think slowly rooted out of our process. I think early on you rely on this sort of, oh, I'm just going to hire the smartest, most capable person I can find. But you kind of forget that sometimes the job needs a very specific skills, attributes, experiences for them to be successful. And if you don't enumerate that and then go look for it, you're probably not going to find the right person. I think then you start to sort of get very sort of talented and specific people, but then the failure mode is more, they don't like fit broadly defined, right? Their sort of sense of ambition or pace or expectation around timeline or their own considerations, doesn't line up with either you or the leadership team or the broader company. And that causes kind of like, yeah, problems. So I think then you sort of focus on fit. And ultimately the dream is to find somebody who's both like hyper-capable for the role that the business needs and a great fit with kind of how the business operates. And that's when the magic happens, when you kind of really unlock impact.
