Lovable is moving away from the specialist, cross-functional squad model popularized by companies like Spotify, believing it creates decision-making bottlenecks. Instead, they hire "high slope" generalists with broad skills and good judgment who can own projects from start to finish, using AI to fill gaps.

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.

Prioritize hiring generalist "athletes"—people who are intelligent, driven, and coachable—over candidates with deep domain expertise. Core traits like Persistence, Heart, and Desire (a "PhD") cannot be taught, but a smart athlete can always learn the product.

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.

At Larroudé, the executive culture is "hands-on." Leaders are not just strategists who delegate; they must be able to execute tasks themselves. Furthermore, a critical hiring criterion for leadership is the ability to recruit, with the expectation that they can build out their own high-performing teams.

The creator of Claude Code prioritizes hiring generalists who possess skills beyond coding, such as product sense and a desire to talk to users. This 'full-stack' approach, where even PMs and data scientists code, fosters a more effective and versatile team.

Bolt's philosophy of hiring entrepreneurial 'smart generalists' was key to its resilience and ability to pivot. When the company needed to shift focus from ride-hailing to food delivery overnight during COVID, its adaptable talent pool was a critical asset. An organization of specialists would have been unable to make such a drastic change so quickly.

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performers often possess high agency, energy, and learning speed, allowing them to adapt without needing to unlearn outdated habits.

Instead of recruiting for a job spec, Cursor identifies exceptional individuals and "swarms" them with team attention. If there's mutual interest, a role is created to fit their talents. This talent-first approach, common in pro sports, prioritizes acquiring top-tier people over filling predefined needs.