When building core AI technology, prioritize hiring 'AI-native' recent graduates over seasoned veterans. These individuals often possess a fearless execution mindset and a foundational understanding of new paradigms that is critical for building from the ground up, countering the traditional wisdom of hiring for experience.
Unlike traditional software development, AI-native founders avoid long-term, deterministic roadmaps. They recognize that AI capabilities change so rapidly that the most effective strategy is to maximize what's possible *now* with fast iteration cycles, rather than planning for a speculative future.
While AI-native, new graduates often lack the business experience and strategic context to effectively manage AI tools. Companies will instead prioritize senior leaders with high AI literacy who can achieve massive productivity gains, creating a challenging job market for recent graduates and a leaner organizational structure.
AI tools are so novel they neutralize the advantage of long-term experience. A junior designer who is curious and quick to adopt AI workflows can outperform a veteran who is slower to adapt, creating a major career reset based on agency, not tenure.
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.
It's nearly impossible to hire senior product or engineering leaders who are also fluent in AI. The advice for experienced managers is to step back into an Individual Contributor (IC) role. This allows them to build hands-on AI skills, demonstrating the humility and beginner's mindset necessary to lead in this new era.
Experience alone no longer determines engineering productivity. An engineer's value is now a function of their experience plus their fluency with AI tools. Experienced coders who haven't adapted are now less valuable than AI-native recent graduates, who are in high demand.
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performers often possess high agency, energy, and learning speed, allowing them to adapt without needing to unlearn outdated habits.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.
In a paradigm shift like AI, an experienced hire's knowledge can become obsolete. It's often better to hire a hungry junior employee. Their lack of preconceived notions, combined with a high learning velocity powered by AI tools, allows them to surpass seasoned professionals who must unlearn outdated workflows.