When a top engineer planned to leave to found a startup, Amplitude retained him by giving him autonomy to build his own project (AI Visibility). They offered a safe space to learn "while getting paid" and promised to fund his future venture, turning a potential talent loss into a massive product win.

To hire entrepreneurial talent, Brex offers the chance to solve interesting problems and immediately deploy solutions to its 40,000 customers. This access to instant distribution is a powerful lure that startups can't match.

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.

Treat hiring as a compounding flywheel. A new employee should not only be a great contributor but also make the company more attractive to future A-players, whether through their network, reputation, or interview presence. This focus on recruiting potential ensures talent density increases over time.

Instead of an extremely difficult hiring process, Netflix casts a wide net and uses the first year to assess fit, resulting in a high (~20%) attrition rate. The company is transparent about this, offering the chance to work on hard problems with great people in exchange for less job security.

Actively recruiting entrepreneurs whose own ventures recently failed brings in smart, driven individuals with high ownership and a hunger to prove themselves. This is invaluable in the early, capital-constrained days when you need a team with a founder's DNA.

Ramp's hiring philosophy prioritizes a candidate's trajectory and learning velocity ("slope") over their current experience level ("intercept"). They find young, driven individuals with high potential and give them significant responsibility. This approach cultivates a highly talented and loyal team that outperforms what they could afford to hire on the open market.

Rippling actively hires former founders because they have a unique ability to find paths forward when facing seemingly impossible constraints. Unlike typical managers who present problems, founders understand that if the 'reasonable' path leads to failure, they must find an 'unreasonable' one to survive.

Constant exposure to top founders and a build-centric environment at YC creates an irresistible "itch" to start a company. The organization accepts that its best employees will almost always leave to become founders themselves, not to join other tech giants.