At HubSpot, Elias Torres built an exceptional team, hiring future founders of companies like Klaviyo. His strategy was to ignore credentials and instead screen for hunger, grit, and intelligence through conversation. He believes giving people with non-traditional backgrounds a shot is key to finding outliers.

OpenGov's CEO advises against the conventional wisdom of hiring salespeople with deep government experience. Instead, his company seeks hungry, courageous, and disciplined individuals and trains them internally on domain specifics, finding this approach more effective.

Alpine's hiring philosophy for leaders downplays resume experience, instead focusing on core attributes like grit, humility, and emotional intelligence. They believe these traits are better predictors of success and that specific business skills can be trained on top of this strong foundation.

When hiring, prioritize a candidate's speed of learning over their initial experience. An inexperienced but rapidly improving employee will quickly surpass a more experienced but stagnant one. The key predictor of long-term value is not experience, but intelligence, defined as the rate of learning.

Sales experience on a resume can be a 'false positive.' When hiring SDRs, prioritize untrainable qualities like work ethic, mindset, and resilience over specific past roles. These character traits are a better predictor of long-term success than skills that can be taught.

To build a culture of continuous improvement, prioritize hiring for coachability. Individuals with backgrounds in competitive athletics or music are often ideal because they have been heavily coached their whole lives. They view direct feedback not as criticism, but as an essential tool for getting better.

Aravind Srinivas intentionally avoids hiring candidates with established track records from large tech companies. He believes people hungry for their first major success are more motivated and better suited for a startup's intensity than those who may be less driven after a previous big win.

In rapidly evolving fields like AI, pre-existing experience can be a liability. The highest performers often possess high agency, energy, and learning speed, allowing them to adapt without needing to unlearn outdated habits.

For cutting-edge AI problems, innate curiosity and learning speed ("velocity") are more important than existing domain knowledge. Echoing Karpathy, a candidate with a track record of diving deep into complex topics, regardless of field, will outperform a skilled but less-driven specialist.