Talent

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Daniel stressed the importance of hobbyists and “weirdos,” noting that many major mainstream internet revolutions started with products that appeared to be niche. It is the people who work intently on pleasing a narrow fan base, but pleasing them intensely, who end up with the skills and networks to market the product to broader audiences. So very often, if you are looking for a start-up that will hit it big, do something counterintuitive by seeking out people aiming, at least at first, to please smaller and weirder audiences.
• “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?”
• If the person does engage in daily, intensive self-improvement, perhaps eschewing more typical and more social pursuits, there is a greater chance they are the kind of creative obsessive who can make a big difference.
• After everyone was seated, the game of dinner discussion began. Events like this, in which ideas are shotgunned out at a rapid pace, often provide a quick window into whether a person’s true interests lie in status or in ideas. They allow you to catch a glimpse into a person’s creative talents. Status-seekers focus on maximizing attention from the perceived elite. Idea-seekers, on the other hand, want to advance knowledge and stimulate curiosity, speaking to the entire room and holding the attention of the group. Intrigue is their reserve currency, and conjectures are often framed as questions, not statements.
• It is evident that a lot of people want to find talent, but they do not always succeed. According to the Conference Board Annual Survey, hiring talent is the top concern of CEOs and other senior business executives. Furthermore, the unavailability of needed skills and talent is judged to be the number one threat to businesses. When we speak to CEOs, nonprofit directors, or venture capitalists, lack of proper talent—and how to go about finding more of it—is an obsessive concern of theirs.
• The decision to take a job or pursue an opportunity is almost always a decision about other people—namely, those you will be working with and answering to, no matter what your place in the hierarchy.
• Virtually all of you are familiar with the standard bureaucratic interview setup. A bunch of people show up in a room, armed with scripted questions (and answers), often bored by the process and hoping for the best; they are trying to find someone who seems “good enough” and capable of commanding consensus by being decent but most of all sufficiently unobjectionable.
• We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly. In referring to the creative spark, we mean people who generate new ideas, start new institutions, develop new methods for executing on known products, lead intellectual or charitable movements, or inspire others by their very presence, leadership, and charisma, regardless of the context. Those are all people who have the gift of improving the world by reimagining the future as a different and better place.
• Far too often there is no really good answer, not because the talent doesn’t exist somewhere, but because it is hard to find and mobilize. There is a shortage of workers and leaders who can make things happen.
  • Connect to quote - “everyone wants to build but no one wants to maintain.”
• Credentialism plays an important role in helping us narrow down who is best for the job. But when it misses the mark, it hurts the candidate and employer, limits the economic and social mobility of those who can’t afford an advanced degree, and encourages overinvestment in formal education. If we wish to combat excess credentialism and restore America as a land of true opportunity, we have to get better at talent search.
• Talent search is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor, based on the premise that there is always more value to be found in our world. But finding this talent is itself a creative skill, akin to music or art appreciation. It cannot be done by boilerplate interviews, groupthink, algorithms, studying PowerPoints, or simple formulas.
• For all the importance of talent, we find it striking that there is not a single go-to book on talent search akin to, say, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People for sales, Andy Grove’s High Output Management for CEOs, or Robert Cialdini’s Influence for marketing and personal relationships.
• a venture capital context, Peter realizes that our moral judgments are some of our most penetrating and motivated sources of insight, and that helps him bring extra faculties to bear on talent judgment issues. In our view, Peter actually asks whether you deserve to succeed, as he understands that concept, and he derives additional information from that interior and indeed deeply emotional line of inquiry. It is often moral judgments that call forth our deepest and most energetic intuitions.
• Getting better at talent evaluation really does require continuously testing and honing your skills by observing the natural experiment that is everyday life. Make talent evaluation one of your hobbies.
• Always ask: In which areas might this work? Might this not work? When does this work or not work? We call that last question “looking for the cross-sectional variation.” If you don’t understand when and where a particular claim is wrong, you probably don’t understand the claim in the first place, and you probably shouldn’t be relying on it so heavily. It is the understanding of context that breeds alertness to talent.
  • Triangulation
• Any move to become a better appreciator of the talents and virtues of others probably also will improve your skills at ruthlessly identifying the causes of human failure. Such is the burden of knowledge.
• These days, our very favorite interview question is this one: “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”
• The very best performers don’t stop practicing for very long, and if you hear or sense that a person doesn’t do much practicing and skill refining in his or her spare time, they probably are poorly suited to assume a top position or to meet very high expectations.
• We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.” So for instance, “What subreddits or blogs do you read?” usually is better than “What did you do at your previous job?” We very much like the title of the research paper by Mohammed Khwaja and Aleksandar Matic, “Personality Is Revealed During Weekends,” and in that piece the researchers attempt to measure how people use their smartphones outside of work hours. If someone truly is creative and inspiring, it will show up in how they allocate their spare time.
• Being a fast mover and being decisive—it is very hard to be successful and not have those traits as a founder. Why that is, I’m not perfectly clear on, but I think it is something … about the only advantage that start-ups have or the biggest advantage that start-ups have over large companies is agility, speed, willing to make non-consensus, concentrated bets, incredible focus. That’s really how you get to beat a big company.
• The interview is fundamentally about how to engage with people, and if you cannot engage with people, you cannot break through the combination of bravado, nerves, and possibly even deceit that people bring to their interviews.
• Don’t approach interviewing as a process where you are trying to trick or trip up the other person. First, that is intrinsically a bad way to behave. Second, once the person realizes what you’re doing, they’ll stop trusting you and, in most cases, become guarded. That will make it harder for you to determine whether the person is a good match for your job or assignment, not to mention harder to land them should you decide they are.
• Caring about their answers will put the other person at ease, but more importantly, it will often put you at ease too. It will get them—and you—into the mode of inquiry, the mode of curiosity, the mode of conversation, and the mode of learning. It will signal that you feel you can learn from them, and encourage them to feel comfortable responding in kind.
• A simple question designed to elicit a story, such as “What did you do this morning?,” is a good way to begin to get to know a person without being threatening. The stories you hear will reflect how the candidate organizes ideas, adds emotional valence, drives a narrative arc, and selects what is important.
• Here are some questions that not only will elicit stories but also might yield relatively interesting answers: “How did you spend your morning today?” “What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from another human?” “What’s something weird or unusual you did early on in life?” “What’s a story one of your references might tell me when I call them?” “If I was the perfect Netflix, what type of movies would I recommend for you and why?” “How do you feel you are different from the people at your current company?” “What views do you hold religiously, almost irrationally?” “How did you prepare for this interview?” “What subreddits, blogs, or online communities do you enjoy?” “What is something esoteric you do?”
• Daniel also likes to ask interview candidates to share their criticisms of the Pioneer tournaments he runs to select eventual recipients of Pioneer’s investments. He is looking for a specific approach to their critique, as much as the substance of their response. He gets especially worried when they ramble on vaguely rather than providing a focused approach to feedback, or when they choose to unload their gripes on the broader world of tech (a common response that suggests a lack of focus). He seeks specificity and frankness that focus on how Pioneer’s tournaments can be improved.
• Most of us have a bias toward well-spoken and articulate storytellers. But make sure you keep an awareness of this at the front of your mind, for it can cause you to hire glib but unsubstantial people and overlook rare creative talent. Do not overestimate the importance of the person’s articulateness. Focus instead on the substance and quality of the answers to your questions.
• As you present your questions and listen to the candidate’s stories in response, note whether the interviewee uses unusual expressions, seems to be coining their own phrases, explains basic concepts in a way different from what you might hear in the mainstream, speaks as if they are developing useful memes, has unusual rhythmic patterns to their speech, or conjures up a unique worldview. There are some people who, when they speak, no matter what the topic, seem to draw you into their own worldview, almost like an act of magic, like you are stepping into a movie, TV show, computer game, or graphic novel of their making. This can be a sign of their energy and creativity.
• But if you are looking for a founder, an entrepreneur, a maverick, or a highly productive intellectual to lead a venture to the next level, creating and commanding one’s own language may be an important positive feature.
• As an aside, this point about language is one reason knowledge of the humanities, reading fiction, and being bilingual or trilingual can help you locate creative talent. If you are going to recognize what new personal languages look like, it helps to have been exposed to them in the past.
• The key point here is that the best interviews are not formal interviews at all. We’re sure you can think of other creative ways to take the candidate out of interview mode and into their everyday self. This is important, because the everyday self is what you’ll get if you hire them.
• Here are a few somewhat more unusual questions we recommend—again, depending on context—with more questions coming in the section on how to get “meta”: “What are ten words your spouse or partner or friend would use to describe you?” “What’s the most courageous thing you’ve done?” “If you joined us and then in three to six months you were no longer here, why would that be?” Or ask the same question about five years down the line as well and see how the two answers differ. “What did you like to do as a child?” This gets at what they really like to do, because it harks back to a time before the world started bossing them around.7 “Did you feel appreciated at your last job? What was the biggest way in which you did not feel appreciated?”
• Regarding the last question, the one about not feeling appreciated: many people cannot hold in their emotions here. In general, be wary of candidates who use a lot of negative words; it is a sign of possible future troubles and lack of cooperativeness in the workplace. Even if the negative experiences at the person’s previous job were not at all their fault, you wish to assess the extent to which they can move on from bad experiences. Negative words can be less of a bad sign if you are interviewing a potential boss or founder, as in that case you may be looking for a kind of revolutionary disagreeableness; even then, users of negative words can be trouble. Be wary of curse words, excess deployment of the word “hate,” and too much talk about whose feelings got hurt and why and whether the complaint is justified or not.
• Consider one of the most renowned interview questions of all time: “What is it you believe to be true that other smart people you know think is crazy?”
• When Tyler first put the absurd beliefs question out there, his favorite (written) answer was: “I believe that if you go to the beach, but you do not give the ocean a chance to taste you, she will come take her taste when she chooses.” He later met the person who wrote that, and she turned out to be remarkably smart and productive, and she was underplaced in her job at the time.
• Tyler also has experimented, with success, with an inverted version of the question. This one is useful only for limited purposes, but here goes: “What is one mainstream or consensus view that you wholeheartedly agree with?”
• Laszlo Bock, formerly Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations, announced, “We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time.” That is perhaps an overstatement, as there are still successful quantitative hedge funds that seem to find such questions useful for testing analytical abilities. Still, for most jobs, you probably are better off asking a direct analytical question about the actual job in question.
• “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?” “What views do you hold almost irrationally?”
• A related and decent interview question is: “Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about?” The most brutal of all the meta questions is: “How do you think this interview is going?”
• Finally, here is another useful question used by Peter Thiel: “How successful do you want to be?” Or this variant favored by Tyler: “How ambitious are you?”
• Alternatively, a potential fellowship recipient might have the ambition to cure cancer; a person who actually has such an ambition will be able to articulate it pretty clearly and with some degree of conviction.
• Finally, we are struck by these three questions for interviewing that Stripe CEO Patrick Collison presented to Reid Hoffman in their public interview from 2019.14 Patrick doesn’t seem to have intended these as “for references only questions,” but nonetheless we find them useful in that context. Here goes: Is this person so good that you would happily work for them? Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could? When this person disagrees with you, do you think it will be as likely you are wrong as they are wrong?
• Typically the online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly. You should aim to do that anyway, but online that is all the more imperative. Many online professors report that for their longer scheduled sessions, they find it necessary to resort to Zoom breakout sessions to give the class some sense of control over their own education and thus to maintain the students’ involvement and interest.
• Keep in mind that everyone is looking for talent, and you need to spot the talent that your competitors cannot. It is not obvious how much AI would help you in that quest if it was generally available, and in some regards it might make your task harder because it would make it easier for others to spot the same otherwise undervalued job candidates you’re looking for.
• If you are looking for inventors, IQ is by far the most significant of all the measurable variables we have. Furthermore, at higher levels of measured IQ the probability of becoming an inventor rises all the more. The relevant IQ measure here, by the way, is a variant of the Ravens test, which focuses on visuospatial skills rather than verbal facility.
• You might be wondering how this all squares with our general view that IQ, or more generally, intelligence, is overrated as a source of professional achievement. Well, the same paper shows that IQ plays a much smaller role in determining who ends up in other notable professions. If we look at who in Finland becomes a doctor, of the explained variation IQ accounts for only 8 percent of the total. For a lawyer, the explained variation by IQ is lower yet, namely about 5 percent. In other words, IQ is not, in general, very important, but to the extent measured variables can explain the decision to become an inventor, IQ appears to be quite important, at least compared to other measured variables.
• In other words, even within the category of people with very good test scores, being “smarter yet” correlates with a noticeable boost in pay. And here is the critical point: among this high-IQ group, that is a steeper pay/IQ gradient than we find for the population as a whole. That steeper gradient at the top is consistent with our view that intelligence probably matters most for the very high achievers.
• Yet even then we should not regard measured intelligence as any kind of guarantee of success, if only because most people with superior measured intelligence do not end up being extremely successful in their careers.
• In the multiplicative model, final success requires a fairly tight combination of several traits—variables expressing the strength of particular traits are in some manner multiplied together to achieve a powerful final effect.
• Consider the words of Vladimir Akopian, the brilliant Armenian chess player who never worked very hard at the game and thus never rose to the top: “I believe there are many talented chess players. When I play, sometimes I see players who are very talented. And by talent, many players can be compared easily; it’s not something special. But hard work is very important. And not only hard work but also a player’s weakness in character or some psychological instability can make a difference. Chess is very complicated and all of this counts. Purely in terms of talent, I believe, not only me but many others even maybe surpass these top players. It’s possible. But when you consider all things together—not only talent but the willingness to work hard, to sacrifice everything else, to be psychologically strong—not many have it in them to make it to the very top … there are many factors that need to be in place for a player to reach the world’s elite.”
• It is easy to think of other examples of the nonlinear importance of intelligence at the very top tiers of achievement. Being a top CEO, baseball pitcher, or Nobel Prize–winning scientist may require a combination of numerous traits, where again, the total is greater than the sum of its parts. We call this the whole package.
• Alternatively, if you have decided that trying to spot intelligence is a hopeless activity, at least for you, maybe go into a sector where a lot of older people are working and you can judge them by their experience and vitas, as indeed is most appropriate.
• Perhaps George Benson offered one clue to Hammond’s success when he said, “John Hammond didn’t necessarily care about how many records I could sell: his approach was more along the lines of ‘look at what this talent can do, and I hope you enjoy him as much as I do.’” Still, at the end of the day, Hammond’s history as a scout shows that most of the top talent is not spotted by the establishment right away, precisely because those creators are doing something new and original.
  • Quote about talented people in their closets
• No company has succeeded simply by putting out its shingle for intelligent individuals or by asking hires to solve difficult logic puzzles. While intelligence is, of course, a good thing, Marc argues that, all other factors equal, the more important qualities in a hire are drive, self-motivation, curiosity, and ethics. He also suggests that drive and curiosity coincide to a pretty high degree, especially in an era when the internet allows you, in your spare time, to keep up on your field for free.
• The key instead is to find undervalued companies, and that means companies with hidden virtues. The importance of hidden virtues holds for quality hires as well, whether the dimension in question is smarts or something else.
• Five Factor theory aims to boil down human personalities to their simplest and most intuitively understandable explanatory components. The dominant form of this theory, which is sometimes used to categorize potential hires, presents five major categories for understanding personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Those five factors are complex, and subject to much debate, but here are some shorthand definitions: Neuroticism A general tendency to experience negative emotions and negative affect, including fear, sadness, embarrassment, anger, guilt, and disgust. Extraversion High extraversion will be manifest in terms of an outgoing personality, friendliness and sociability, talkativeness, and a proactive desire to engage with other individuals. Openness to Experience This trait involves open-mindedness, a willingness to explore new and diverse ideas, an experimental bent, curiosity, and an active imagination looking to conceive of additional possibilities. Agreeableness High agreeableness means a desire to get along with others, to help them, to be sympathetic with them, and to cooperate. An individual low in agreeableness is more likely to be competitive and also contrarian. Conscientiousness High-conscientiousness individuals have high self-control, are very responsible, have a strong sense of duty, and usually are good at planning and organizing, due to their reliability.
• In one of the highest-quality and best-known papers in this literature, the Big Five personality traits, taken together, predicted about 32 percent of the variation in career success as measured in terms of income.
• In one study of scientists, personality variables explained up to 20 percent of the variance in achievement, after adjusting for scientific potential and intelligence. That’s not proof of how well personality variables predict wages, but it does show a broadly consistent picture regarding how much personality correlates with human success in mastering and climbing external hierarchies, whether those hierarchies concern pay or scientific recognition.
• Failures and setbacks hit particularly hard when there’s nobody else to blame. Great founders productively gain knowledge and momentum from their experiences, even the failures, and that requires a great degree of energy, curiosity, and power.
• Sam Altman, the former head of the venture capital firm Y Combinator, offers his own take on the idiosyncrasies of founders:
• Being a fast mover is a big thing; a somewhat trivial example is that I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails. Also, it sounds obvious, but the successful founders I’ve funded believe they are eventually certain to be successful.
• One prominent result in this data set was that conscientiousness really mattered for earnings. The men who measured as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness on average earned $567,000 more over their careers, which measures as 16.7 percent higher average lifetime earnings (though again, we cannot be sure this is a causal relationship).
• The main result was that venture capitalists like to hear very positive, optimistic pitches, but the people making those pitches underperform when it comes to actual results. So don’t be too swayed by agreeableness, because very often it doesn’t deliver on its promises. The disagreeable founders, who will tell you that you have it all wrong and that the world is badly screwed up and on the wrong track, may end up doing better.
• Interestingly, eminent scientists are more likely to be dominant, arrogant, hostile, and self-confident compared to scientists as a whole. They are also more flexible in thought and behavior than scientists of lesser laurels.
• The novelist Vikram Seth has said that he ended up writing his masterpiece, A Suitable Boy, because he did not have enough conscientiousness to finish his economics Ph.D. at Stanford. But that points out the need to ask the question “Conscientiousness for what?” He did finish a very long novel (and subsequent works) and work very hard on its quality, and the book went on to be a bestseller and also a literary classic. As Seth said: “Obsession keeps me going.” He eventually developed the right obsession and piled hard work on top of that.
• The concept of “externalizing behavior”—that is, directing emotions and motivations outward—is linked to aggression and hyperactivity, and it is very often a bad thing. Nonetheless, for many individuals, especially for many men, such externalizing behavior predicts higher earnings, and you can think of this point as related to the virtues of disagreeableness. For these men, the externalizing behavior predicts both lower educational attainment and higher earnings; in other words, don’t always look for superior performance in school.
• We find it useful to contrast the concepts of conscientiousness, grit, and what we call stamina. We see stamina as one of the great underrated concepts for talent search, especially when you are looking for top performers and leaders and major achievers. On stamina, economist Robin Hanson wrote: “It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I finally got to see some very successful people up close for long enough to notice a strong pattern: the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others.… I think this helps explain many cases of ‘why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?’ Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will, to apply it. I’ve known many such people.”
• Robin also points out that many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career. In essence, they are testing to see who has the requisite stamina for subsequent achievement. (You might feel those tests are wasteful in some way, but still, those tests seem to survive in some very competitive settings.)
• Sometimes the literature speaks of “grit,” but we find “stamina” to be a more accurate term. Grit is sometimes defined as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals of personal significance,” but that involves two dimensions, the passion and the perseverance. Furthermore, it turns out that grit is strongly correlated with conscientiousness. The one feature of grit that still seems to matter statistically, after adjusting for conscientiousness, is perseverance of effort, not passion. That result is close to what we are calling stamina, and so the stamina concept seems to transcend conscientiousness and to be the more relevant portion of grit. Ideally, what you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.
• Does the person have an obsession with continual self-improvement? Let’s turn again to the words of venture capitalist Sam Altman: It’s easiest if you get to meet people in person, several times. If you meet someone three times in three months, and notice detectable improvement each time, pay attention to that. The rate of improvement is often more important than the current absolute ability (in particular, younger founders can sometimes improve extremely quickly).
• So much of personality theory focuses on observing levels or absolute degrees of personality traits. You should instead focus on whether the person is experiencing positive rates of change for dynamism, intellect, maturity, ambition, stamina, and other relevant features.
• Tyler likes to ask people is “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?” Tyler likes to think of many jobs in a way that a professional musician or athlete would find natural. By asking this question, you learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement, and again, as noted earlier, you might learn some tricks yourself. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond whatever particular practices they engage in. If a person doesn’t seem to think much about self-improvement, they still might be a good hire, but then you had better be pretty content with their currently demonstrated level of expertise.
• Some people will call it ambition, some will call it extraversion, but there’s a certain vitality to individuals that can be striking. They talk quickly, move quickly, and in general seem to be enthralled with life. They run all possible combinations of ideas through their heads, if only to better understand the possibilities. Along these lines, they tend to be high in openness as a personality trait. We call this quality “generativeness.” If you hang around people like this, you are likely to come up with new ideas from your interactions. It is common, for instance, that a generative person talks about ideas that later blossom into companies, or perhaps policy proposals, or useful predictions about the future.
• We’ve met plenty of smart people who, unfortunately, fall into the category of pessimistic perfectionists. Such individuals typically believe that their work is never good enough, and that their careers are either likely to fail or not meet a high enough standard. You can spot them when you see someone who is smart but never quite ready to put their work forward. They don’t have the ongoing drive and impetus of insecure overachievers. Instead, it is common for individuals in this group to develop excuses and to sabotage their careers in advance, all so they don’t have to keep on encountering feelings of ongoing failure. Somewhat counterintuitively, they fail preemptively, in order to get it over with and so they can feel they are in control along the way. For them, it is truly hard to push that “send” or “publish” button or whatever the equivalent may be. Perhaps there are ways you can take advantage of the smarts of these individuals. Often they tend to be perceptive about human relationships (part of their problem may be an absence of self-deception; after all, most people are not world-class, but they may be more motivated if they overestimate their own prospects by a bit). But make sure you are not relying on them to be either the initiators or the finishers. Sometimes they can work well in teams where they contribute but don’t feel so responsible for the final outputs or sign-off decisions.
• Or consider the world of early bloggers, inhabited by quite a few very smart and hardworking people. Some of them are still sitting in sweatpants in their parents’ basement and writing some intriguing posts. But Ezra Klein saw that the sector was evolving, and so he helped found the website Vox, aspiring to a higher station by creating a start-up and later moving to The New York Times. Henry Farrell, of the blog Crooked Timber, helped found the blog The Monkey Cage, which continues to be published by The Washington Post and exercises great influence. Megan McArdle worked her way into being a columnist for The Daily Beast, Bloomberg, and then The Washington Post. Those are among the individuals who understood the hierarchies before them and developed strategies for climbing toward the top. Were they smarter than their bloggy competitors? Maybe. But what really set them apart was their ability to figure out new ways to climb the totem pole of achievement and to move from a narrower to a broader vision of what that totem pole really is.
• Again, focusing on the “too large,” like focusing on the “too small,” is a sign that insecurities, blinders, and lack of perspective will prevent the person from climbing the relevant ladders of success.
• Some people are simply keen to develop as many different perspectives as possible, for some mix of both practical and temperamental reasons. This is a kind of curiosity, but it goes beyond mere curiosity of the sort that leads you to turn over unturned stones. This curiosity is about models, frameworks, cultural understandings, disciplines, and methods of thought, the kinds of traits that made John Stuart Mill such a great thinker and writer. A more recent example is Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe (and also an active writer). His content can draw from economics, science, history, Irish culture, tech, and many other areas and influences.
• Silicon Valley has been successful for many reasons, but one reason is how many people there have mastered the framework of thinking that the future can truly be very different indeed. These people bring together their different visions to work the workable elements of common ground, which then get turned into companies.
• It is different if you are from the middle or bottom tiers of your sector. In that case, not everyone will want to work with you, and perhaps most people won’t want to work with you, as they will be hoping for something better, whether realistically or not. If you are in this position, as many of us are, you need to think especially carefully about what is wrong with the people you are trying to hire. (Sometimes this is called the Groucho Marx effect, as Groucho once stated that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.) Some of them will look great, and they also will do very well in the interview and by other metrics you use. But in that case, you need to start getting nervous. If they want to work with you, maybe there is something wrong with them you haven’t seen yet. Why aren’t they already working somewhere much better? Why are they talking to you at all? Maybe they are totally lacking in self-confidence, or their personalities will turn out to be poison, or they plan on leaving after a year and they are just using you in the meantime. We have noticed there is an entire class of highly credentialed, fairly talented individuals who spend their whole lives hopping from one job to another, restless, never happy, and never able to put down any roots. They are good enough to keep on getting hired, but still, most of the time you should avoid them.
  • #[[The Trough of Feedback]]
• In Peter’s basic model of human behavior, influenced by his former Stanford professor René Girard, mimetic desire is strong—that is, human beings look to copy each other’s behavior and also to display signs of status. (His knowledge of Girard’s framework helped him see that Facebook would be a big success, since people would wish to signal their social rank and standing.) Yet if everyone is copying everyone else, who is left to be an original thinker? To the extent that autistic and Asperger’s individuals remain outside of the usual loops of social pressure and mimetic desire, they may retain strong capacities for original, non-conformist thought. Indeed, they are sometimes unable to conform, and that may encourage their thoughts to move in new and different directions.
• Richard Branson, British billionaire and the founder of Virgin Group, explained how his own dyslexia helped him in his career: “[My dyslexia] helped me think big but keep our messages simple. The business world often gets caught up in facts and figures—and while the details and data are important, the ability to dream, conceptualise, and innovate is what sets the successful and the unsuccessful apart.” In other words, an inability to focus on all of the details can, for some people, reallocate their attention toward a more important bigger picture.
• It is so often the workers who are not impelled to do much of anything at all who are the problem. Have you ever wondered how so many people can just sit there in the airport waiting for their flights, doing nothing? It astonishes us, and it is also a loss of productivity.
• We draw the term “superpowers” from the story of cartoonist Dav Pilkey, a bestselling children’s author who has sold millions of books, most of all from his Dog Man franchise. Pilkey is open about his dyslexia and ADHD, and often when he makes public appearances children with dyslexia and ADHD come to meet him and express their solidarity with signs. Pilkey once stated in an interview: “I don’t call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Delightfulness. I want kids to know that there’s nothing wrong with you. You just think differently, and that’s a good thing. It’s good to think differently. This world needs people who think differently; it’s your superpower.”
• In one study, by economist Martin Abel, 2,700 people are hired to do transcribing work. Associated with the task is a fictitious manager who offers what is in essence fictitious feedback. In this setting, if the (fictitious) boss criticizes the worker, the worker’s job satisfaction falls, and furthermore, the worker starts assigning less importance to the job task. Criticism from the boss isn’t enjoyed, which is hardly big news. But here is the striking result: these effects are twice as large when the negative messages are perceived as coming from female bosses compared to male bosses. Since this is online communication, it cannot be that these (fictitious) bosses are behaving any differently. Rather, it seems that many people have a harder time being criticized by an entity they perceive to be a woman.
• One carefully done study recruited nine hundred workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, both men and women. The men and women were given tasks with possible bonus payments. They also were asked to assess their own performance on the task. When the metric was “I performed well on the test,” with a scale of 1 to 100, women reported an average of 46. The men on average reported an average of 61 on the same scale, even though the actual performance of the men was no better than that of the women. That is a remarkably large difference in self-assessment. Furthermore, note this gap persisted even when both the men and the women had perfect information about their actual performance on the task.
• In one paper, looking at school grades 7–12, young women exposed to “high-achieving boys” perform worse academically and show lower confidence and aspirations. In contrast, they are helped by exposure to high-achieving girls. The young men, in contrast, are not affected by their exposure to either high-achieving boys or high-achieving girls. That too suggests that female discouragement is possible and occurs too frequently.
• It is interesting that Y Combinator, a leading venture capital firm, always has at least one woman as part of a three-partner interview panel. Historically, that position was established by Jessica Livingston, one of the original four founders of YC. Jessica’s acumen is legendary within YC circles, as she has a powerfully accurate gut instinct for talent, and in particular for weeding out bad apples. Jessica has since stepped back somewhat, but the organization has realized that much of that special je ne sais quoi wasn’t unique to her. Women partners seemed better than men at detecting deceit or disingenuous founders. The addition of a woman also changes the conversational dynamic of the screening quorum’s post-interview discussion in subtle and profound ways. We are not sure why but find it interesting that one of the most successful and durable talent screeners in the world requires that women be part of the screening process.
• For example, if you go to Finland, don’t assume that everyone there hates you, is pissed off at you, or doesn’t want to speak with you. The prevailing norms there are for people to be more distant and taciturn. When Tyler visited Finland, he felt he was crude and loud much of the time, and he went out of his way to moderate his behavior so as not to stick out so much. Maybe the Finns could not spot his talents or his articulateness as a result. That is the kind of experience you are trying to have—to feel what it is like when the perception of your talents is blunted. In turn, you will have a better sense of the possibly hidden abilities of others, whether the barriers be those of race, culture, religion, gender, or whatever.
• For similar reasons, a very rapid 24/7 news cycle, driven by social media, also increases the returns to scouting. Everyone is looking for “the next big thing” or the next celebrity, and you won’t find that among the tried-and-true performers, no matter how talented they may be. In the world of music, the Paul McCartney tour makes a lot of money, as do the Rolling Stones, but most of those gains accrue to the performers themselves. The talent spotter who wants to make money would like to find the next Billie Eilish.
• With more people trying their hand at various avocations than ever before, that places more and more burden on talent search and allocation mechanisms. We need to be more open to the accomplishments of self-taught individuals without traditional training.
• And so we wonder: What about all of the Taylor Swifts whose families did not have the means and desire to move them to Nashville and also to switch them to home schooling?
• Another problem is simply that the scouts need to be paid, one way or the other. Furthermore, scouts need to be recruited. (Do you use other scouts for that? Is it “scouts all the way down”?)
• It is a general problem how to get the scouts doing something other than looking good to their bosses. Recently Tyler has started using a very talented scout for his Emergent Ventures program, and he is trying to work out how to incentivize scouts to do something other than to try to copy his judgment. “Don’t please me!” he has urged, but you can see the potential contradiction in that dictate.
• Note, however, that at least some Soviet-style conditions may reemerge in the future in a greater number of sectors—not soon, but it is possible to imagine worlds where there are so much data on individuals, including genetic data, and at such a young age that measurement would once again dominate search. You wouldn’t have to “look for” anybody, at least not if you could access the data in the system. To provide one extreme example, if everyone is tracked and recorded by facial surveillance, you can imagine a futuristic science fiction world where the AI picks out the top possible fashion supermodels and sends them a text message, scheduling the appropriate appointments with the modeling agencies. The point is not that this can or will happen soon; rather, you should keep an open mind as to how the balance between measurement and search is going to evolve. Right now the search dimension is relatively important, but some of the balance could swing the other way in the future. You shouldn’t take the current configurations for granted.
• One upshot here is that if you are doing talent search, you need to figure out whether the scouting model (search) or the gaming model (measurement) best applies to your endeavor. Most likely you will need some combination of both. Still, the market as a whole is not thinking very analytically about either scouts or games, so understanding this distinction is a source of potential competitive advantage to you.
• Nonetheless, we will offer the following (highly speculative) points for finding and evaluating good scouts. First, a good scout does not in general have the same qualities as a good performer overall. Good scouts typically are masters of networking rather than performance per se. Still, the quality scout still must have an excellent understanding of the topic area, but he or she does not need to have been a star. In fact, having been a star may interfere with the objectivity and judgment of the scout. Top stars too often have a kind of intolerance toward other, different kinds of talent, or they expect too much of prospects too quickly. Second, a good scout should have some measure of charisma. The scout isn’t just searching for prospects; prospects are also searching for scouts. The personality of the scout has to stand out in some manner, and it has to attract the aspirational side of potential top performers. In this regard, think of talent search as a kind of two-way matching platform. Put yourself, at least temporarily, in the shoes of a prospect and ask what kind of scout might attract you. Scouting is competitive, and your scout is not the only one out there, least of all for a potential top prospect. In some ways, picking a scout is more like “picking a scouted” than you might at first think. After all, where is the bargaining power in this market really going to lie—with the scout or with the potential future star? Third, excellent scouts should be very good at communicating back to the home office, especially in larger, more bureaucratized organizations. It’s not enough to find the next big thing; you need to convince others you have done so. Therefore look for writing and presentation skills—and, yes, once again, charisma—so that what the scout learns can be translated into action. In smaller organizations, if you are scouting for yourself, this factor is less likely to matter, and if you are a charismatic brooding loner you still might be pretty effective as a scout, at least provided your personality matches the level of scale you are operating at.12 Fourth, if you are using nontraditional means to look for talent, don’t just load up on specialists in the old-style methods. The Houston Astros, for instance, used a McKinsey consultant and also a former blackjack dealer (he was a former engineer as well) to help them turn their baseball talent quest into a highly advanced quantitative pursuit. The old-school baseball scouts, as you might expect, thought it was all about intuition and personal contacts, and so they were not ideal choices to usher in these new methods of search, in spite of their expertise in the game and in player development. So keep an open mind about what kinds of backgrounds you might be looking for. Either a “quant” or a humanities specialist could turn out to be more valuable than someone with narrow sectoral expertise (again, subject to the condition that you are trying out new methods of talent search, and the…
• One final point is this. For all the resources you put into scouting, interviewing, and trying to suss out the better candidates, there is no real substitute for having a good or great pool of candidates. That will depend on your soft networks, ones that you and your institutions have been cultivating for years (you hope). It depends on the people you know, the other institutions willing to recommend you, the image of your institution in the eyes of the informed public, your network of previous employees, the media coverage you have received, your social media presence, and possibly donors or board members, among other factors. Most of these possible candidates you will not know personally; maybe no one on your team will know them personally. Still, they know you, in some manner or another, and it may be possible to get them to come out of the woodwork and apply for a job or a fellowship.
• Tony then cites Tyler (on Tim Ferriss’s show) speaking as follows: “I try to stay a bit weird and obscure enough that mostly quite smart people are writing me. If I had too many not smart emails I would feel that I was doing something else wrong with what I’m writing.… The rate of good applications is reasonably high. Maybe I’m lowering it just by talking about the program.”
• The best way to do an online interview is to have a formidable online reputation and presence in the first place, because that will attract the more desirable candidates.
• If you believe that talent is the greatest asset of your institution, you also ought to believe that your soft network is one of the greatest assets of your institution. Because that is how you will attract your talent in the future; furthermore, those subsequent hires will help you retain your current talent by making your institution more successful and a more attractive and prestigious place to be.
• Most people, if you ask them, will agree on the importance of soft networks, but in terms of actual practice, such networks remain neglected. On any given day in your business or institution, there are fires to be put out. Acting to extend your informal networks feels like a nice thing to do, but rarely does it seem urgent or necessary. Furthermore, building up a soft network is not always so easy. Doing quality work, in some publicly observable manner, often does more to build up the soft network than waking up in the morning and proclaiming, “Hey, let’s build out the soft network today!” It is often the case that institutions with very strong informal social networks ended up with them indirectly, as the result of projects they wanted to undertake anyway, rather than through the direct planning of an informal soft network.
• As George Eliot put it in Daniel Deronda: “It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.”
• Don’t underestimate how little people, including your employees and applicants, may think of themselves. There is an ongoing crisis of confidence in many human beings, even in the best of times, and that means high returns from nudging talent in the proper direction. If you are able to spot people who are having a confidence crisis and if you understand the nature of those crises, you’re all the better placed to give them the right kind of positive nudge.
• When you raise the aspirations of an individual, in essence you are bending upward the curve of that person’s achievement for the rest of his or her life. There is a powerful multiplier effect of compounding returns that can continue for many decades. Actually, the full net impact can be longer yet, if that individual in turn works to later raise the aspirations of others. If you are helping to create an individual who raises the aspirations of many others, the return on your initial aspiration-raising activity can be that much higher.
• If you have any doubts about the power of environment and the framing of aspirations, consider just how much genius and achievement have been clustered in time and space throughout history. The statistician David Banks wrote a paper on this phenomenon called “The Problem of Excess Genius.” Ancient Athens in its time had Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sappho, Aristophanes, and many other notable figures. It wasn’t “something in the water”; rather, Athens had the right ethos and cultural self-confidence, combined with institutional structures for learning, debating philosophy, and writing for the theater, all of which identified and mobilized this talent. That allowed those individuals to learn and draw inspiration from each other as well as to develop rivalries for excellence, friendly or otherwise.
  • #books-to-read
• The bottom line is that environment, ethos, and competitive rivalry really matter, and to the extent you can create the proper conditions in your local ecosystem, you can have a major impact on talent mobilization.
• You might wonder: If the benefits from a higher slope are so great, why isn’t the higher, steeper slope chosen in the first place? Arguably this is one of the mysteries of human nature, but we think it springs from the nature of choice. When making decisions, people do not usually have a complete map of the options and their probabilities before them. In fact, many of the options can be difficult to imagine.
• One of the seminal cultural takes on mentorship is the 2014 movie Whiplash, about a drumming teacher who pushes his students as far as they can go. Daniel has been struck by how many of the people he has interviewed at Pioneer cite this film as an influence. Perhaps the film is appealing because it describes the pursuit of excellence and validation through hard work. Great people want to be great. They want to be pushed to become the best version of themselves. They’re also equally uncertain, often searching for recognition as to where they stand in the world. The story of a young drummer clamoring for his teacher’s approval resonates with them. No, we don’t argue for throwing drumsticks at your charges, but still, your approval has to be seen as something worth earning.
• Nonetheless, it is striking how few places make sense for most of the people who might be getting travel grants, since most places do not have clusters of world-class talent in any significant amount. In fact, we view the scarcity of appropriate travel destinations as one sign among many that the world is not doing a good job at discovering and mobilizing top-tier talent. Since most people never get their chance to see “the big time” in their preferred field or avocation, their full potential is never realized.
• For useful comments and discussion and assistance, the authors wish to thank Adaobi Adibe, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Christina Cacioppo, Agnes Callard, Bryan Caplan, Greg Caskey, Ben Casnocha, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Natasha Cowen, Michelle Dawson, Alice Evans, Richard Fink, Elad Gil, Auren Hoffman, Reid Hoffman, Robin Hanson, Ben Horowitz, Coleman Hughes, Garett Jones, Charles Koch, Sandor Lehoczky, Kadeem Noray, Shruti Rajagopalan, Daniel Rothschild, Hollis Robbins, Michael Rosenwald, Virgil Storr, Alex Tabarrok, Peter Thiel, Erik Torenberg, Peter Tosjl, and others we surely have forgotten.