To cultivate a culture of high agency, frame ultimate responsibility as a privilege, not a burden. By telling new hires 'everything's your fault now,' you immediately set the expectation that they have control and are empowered to solve problems. This approach attracts and retains individuals who see ownership as an opportunity to make an impact.

The most effective hires are individuals with the entrepreneurial drive to build their own business but who recognize greater potential in leveraging your company's platform and distribution. This strategy attracts talent that thinks like owners, not employees, and can run their departments autonomously.

Stop asking "how" to solve a problem and start asking "who" is the right person to solve it. Shifting your mindset to hiring A+ players who can take ownership of outcomes is the key to unlocking the next level of growth and freeing up your own time.

Before hiring for a critical function, founders should do the job themselves, even if they aren't experts. The goal isn't mastery, but to deeply understand the role's challenges. This experience is crucial for setting a high hiring bar and being able to accurately assess if a candidate will truly up-level the team.

The ideal early startup employee has an extreme bias for action and high agency. They identify problems and execute solutions without needing approvals, and they aren't afraid to fail. This contrasts sharply with candidates from structured environments like consulting, who are often more calculated and risk-averse.

Lovable prioritizes hiring individuals with extreme passion, high agency, and autonomy—people for whom the work is a core part of their identity. This focus on intrinsic motivation, verified through paid work trials, allows them to build a team that can thrive in chaos and drive initiatives from start to finish without supervision.

Successful onboarding requires providing maximum visibility and context in the first 90 days. Founders often fail by succumbing to the "read my mind fallacy," expecting offshore hires to understand tasks without the same training they'd give domestic employees.

The most promising junior candidates are those who demonstrate self-learning by creating things they weren't asked to do, like a weekend app project. This signal of intrinsic motivation is more valuable than perfectly completed assignments.

When hiring, focus on what a person has created, not their stated attributes or background. A great "invention" (a project, a piece of writing, code) is the strongest signal of a great "inventor." This shifts the focus from potential to proven output, as Charlie Munger advised.