This is a part Source by Alex HeathA newspaper about AI and Tech Industry, syndicated to the version customers only once a week.
Billboard did not say “Labs Listen”. It did not say anything about hiring. It consisted of just a plain white background, “and a line of groups hanging over Nobe Hill, San Francisco.
Last month, Alfred Wahlforce, CEO of Startup, Posted on X Whoever cracked the code and later fulfilled a challenge, will win Berlin’s visit and will come on the guest list for ultra-exclusive Nichchlub Bergain.
Recently, one of the more detailed tech startup recruitment stunts in the stunt working in memory, WahlforsS later told me. Within days, Billboard draws millions of ideas online, attracted media coverageCollecting 10,000 email sign-ups, and conducted around 60 interviews with potential candidates.
In the recent conversation I have done with WahlforsS and other startup founders, it is clear that, even for well -funded firms, attracting top technical talent is more challenging than ever. According to WahlforsS, “We are not even advertising the company, but just spending us a tonnes of money to advertise the engineers.” “It has been very challenging to hire good people. I have a friend who is a high school dropout, and he can work in openi and make $ 2 million a year.”
“You spend hours with people who reject you and simply go anthropic. It’s very, very painful.”
WahlforsS recently told me about a candidate who preferred to cycle. His cofounder showed a high-end carbon road bike at the candidate’s house. The gesture helped the candidate to reject other proposals. More often, however, he said that it is impossible to compete with the biggest names in AI and Big Tech. “You spend hours with people who reject you and simply go anthropic. It’s very, very painful.”
You do not have to look far to hear the same stories of rejection. Austin Hughes, the CEO of Unifa, AI Sales platform, which has raised more than $ 50 million, began a painting for a reputed candidate. But Openai offered the compensation to the triple that can provide integrated. The candidate took the money and kept the painting.
Decagon CEO JC Zhang is currently feeling the same squeeze despite running a rapid growing startup worth $ 1.5 billion. “This is one of the things that I am thinking about day by day,” he told me when I asked about the difficulty of recruitment. Decagon has pulled the classic liver to attract candidates, such as hosting fancy dinner with his investor, and offering court shouldid tickets for Warriors Games. Zhang said that he recently reached the south bay and met the family of a candidate.
However, the most reliable strategy he mentioned was not at all attractive: “The first 100 people we had hires all the people I knew.” Hughes said that his team exports its linkedIn network to a shared Google sheet in Unifes and makes an index match to find the best candidates with most employee connections.
So who are all these companies? During my conversation, a consistent radical emerged: a “AI product engineer” that can run the latest AI tools at blistering speed without “shipping slope” and also serve as a product manager. According to WahlforsS, “the intersection of being highly technical and product-focused is very small.” He estimates the pool that at any time consisting of a couple of thousand people with “ten offers”.
While Openai and Anthropic are still seen as two most desirable places to work for such people, a abolition that I have heard repeatedly from founders, is that Big AI Labs are quickly becoming unhappy with the rest of the large technology. As Wahlforss implicated it, the edge for a startup is recruiting one, they can “be like a mini founder” and “build products end-to-end.”
Top-level investors and recognizable brands help on margin, but another consensus was that a fancy cap table now matters less because so many startups are well funded. Zhang feels that the frenzy that is at work will not be forever, though. He said that “a lot of capital,” are a lot of AI startups, and at some point, the bubble will explode, he said. No one knows when.
