The Art of Spotting Greatness

Lessons From Hard Tech’s Talent Leaders

Last week, I had the honor of hosting a dinner in L.A. with some of the talent leaders in our network. Collectively, they’ve helped hire over 500 people since 2020, scaling companies now worth billions in aggregate.

I’ve always wanted to learn more about technical recruiting, but intuitively it doesn’t feel so different from investing, where the alpha comes from recognizing greatness early. A few lessons that stuck with me:

1. The CEO must recruit until talent density reaches critical mass.

The CEO must lead the process for every hire. This experience forces them to understand recruiting firsthand and learn (the hard way) what it means to carry the mission and culture (and navigate overcomplicated software tools ;)) Building complex systems at scale often takes hundreds of people, but those first ~20 to 25 hires provide the backbone, and the CEO must be the architect. It’s no coincidence that talent leads tend to feel ready to join once the architecture is in place and they can work to scale teams under great leaders.

2. Great talent is hard to spot, unless you’ve seen it in action before.

Time spent around excellence expands and deepens your dataset, making it easier to recognize it again. This is the main reason why great recruiters often come from talent dense, engineering-led companies. Doing this well is equal parts science and art: listening closely, understanding how someone fits both the broader culture and the small team they’ll work with every day, and staying comfortable in the ambiguity of human judgment.

3. For talent leaders, authenticity beats prestige.

Eclectic experiences give them credibility that resonates with the talent they’re trying to attract. The group we assembled was an incredible mix of people. A former art curator, an African policy lobbyist, and a CIA analyst are now building teams in aerospace, defense, and communications. When they call a mission exciting, you believe them, because their own paths prove they know how to spot meaning and momentum.

That last point is the takeaway. Recruiting is about being interesting enough that the most talented people want to join you on an improbable mission. If you want to hire awesome people, step one is simple (and written on a sign in Mike’s office): just be awesome.