Curate People

**Nivi** (0:00)
This is Nivi, and you're listening to the Naval podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about recruiting, hiring, team and culture. There's a famous quote from Vinod Khosla, the team you build is the company you build. Or in other words, they told you it was a technology game when it's really a recruiting game. So I pulled up a tweet from Naval from August 2025, founders can delegate everything except recruiting, fund raising, strategy and product vision.

**Naval** (0:35)
Recruiting is the most important thing, because you need creativity, you need motivated people. Ideally, the early people are all geniuses. They're self-managing, low ego, hard working, highly competent, builders, technical, maybe one or two sellers. But you can't watch everything, you can't micromanage everything. The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement and veto, that's a sad day. That's the day that the company is no longer being driven directly by you. There's now a fly by wire element in between. There's some mechanical linkage going through another human, often at a distance, and other people are not gonna have the same level of selectivity that you will as a founder.
The important size at which a company starts changing is not some arbitrary number, like 20 or 30 or 40 It's the point at which the founder is not directly recruiting and managing everyone. The moment that there are middle layers of management, then you are somewhat disconnected from the company and your ability to directly drive a product team that can take the company from zero to one goes away. So you really cannot outsource recruiting. People think you can. They hire recruiters, for example, maybe you can outsource a little bit of sourcing, but I would even argue that's difficult. The reason recruiting is so, so, so important, and a lot of it is obvious, I'll skip the obvious reasons. But one non-obvious reason is that the best people truly only want to work with the best people. Working with anyone who's not at their level is a cognitive load upon them. And the more people they're surrounded by who are not as good as they are, the more keenly they're aware that they belong somewhere else or they should be doing their own thing. The best teams are mutually motivated. They reinforce each other. Everyone's trying to impress each other. One good test is when you're recruiting a new person, you should be able to say to them, walk into that room where the rest of the team is sitting, take anyone you want, pick them at random, pull them aside for 30 minutes and interview them. And if you aren't impressed by them, don't join. When you do that test, you will instinctively flinch at the idea of them interviewing randomly a certain person that's kind of in the back of your mind. That's the person you need to let go. Because that's the person keeping you from having this high-functioning team that all wants to impress each other. That's the bar you have to keep, especially for all the people you're going to directly manage. The first 20, the first 30, the first 40, the first 10, whatever that number is. In those early people that you're going to directly manage, what are you looking for? There's the old Warren Buffett line of intelligence, energy, integrity. I would add low ego. Low ego people are just much easier to manage. They tend to engage less in interpersonal conflict. They care more about the work than about politicking or fighting for credit. You just scale better. You'll be able to manage 30 or 40 low ego people when you might only be able to manage five high ego people because you're always massaging their egos. So I think Vinod's phrase is absolutely correct. That team you build is the company you build, especially for the first N people that you are directly managing. They are the DNA of the company.
Back to the Tweet, you can't outsource fundraising because investors are betting on you. If you're outsourcing fundraising, whoever you're outsourcing to is really the person running the company. Good investors certainly are not going to back a company where there's a proxy fundraiser, which is why companies that raise money through bankers are always starting off on the wrong foot. You shouldn't need a banker to raise money for you. Now, in later rounds, it's a little different because you're reaching money that's outside of the normal venture market. But especially in early stage, if you're engaging a banker, that's symptomatic of a deeper problem. Strategy, you have to set and communicate the strategy. Product vision, this is the one that's up for debate. There are some founders who outsource product vision, but I would argue that because your job here is to take the best team you can find and distill their energy into a perfect product, to instantiate their knowledge and creativity into a product, you need to unify the product vision. One person needs to hold any complex product entirely in their head. And this is where it helps to have more than one founder, because it's rare that someone can fundraise and recruit and hold product vision entirely in their head. Steve Jobs was one of these people. Elon Musk is probably another one. But usually you see a two-person team. One person who's better at selling, although it helps if they have some builder background, so they know what they're talking about. And one person who's better at building, but it helps if they have a little bit of a seller bone, because they're probably going to be recruiting the other builders. I don't think you can outsource any of those four. There are cases where product vision has been outsourced. There's some brilliant person underneath who's driving the product vision, but those are rare. Usually all four are handled by the core founding team.