Sending a resume is now an outdated and ineffective way to get noticed by AI startups. The proven strategy is to demonstrate high agency by building a relevant prototype or feature improvement and emailing it directly to the founders. This approach has led to key hires at companies like Suno and Micro One.
Companies with valuable proprietary data should not license it away. A better strategy to guide foundation model development is to keep the data private but release public benchmarks and evaluations based on it. This incentivizes LLM providers to train their models on the specific tasks you care about, improving their performance for your product.
The context from daily sales and support calls is incredibly valuable but often ephemeral. A powerful, underutilized agent use case is to transcribe these calls and feed them to an LLM to automatically generate sales coaching notes, customer FAQs, testimonials, and even new keyword-targeted landing pages based on customer language.
Since AI assistants make it easy for candidates to complete take-home coding exercises, simply evaluating the final product is no longer an effective screening method. The new best practice is to require candidates to build with AI and then explain their thought process, revealing their true engineering and problem-solving skills.
AI co-pilots have accelerated engineering velocity to the point where traditional design-led workflows are now the slowest part of product development. In response, some agile teams are flipping the process, having engineers build a functional prototype first and then creating formal Figma designs and UI polish later.
With the public internet fully indexed, LLMs now require net-new, high-fidelity data to improve. This has created a booming market for domain experts in fields like law, finance, and medicine to work as freelance "AI trainers." This new job category involves creating complex, proprietary data sets, often for high compensation.
Fully autonomous agents are not yet reliable for complex production use cases because accuracy collapses when chaining multiple probabilistic steps. Zapier's CEO recommends a hybrid "agentic workflow" approach: embed a single, decisive agent within an otherwise deterministic, structured workflow to ensure reliability while still leveraging LLM intelligence.
To compete with massive compensation packages from Meta and OpenAI, smaller startups like Suno must counter-pitch a strong, mission-driven culture. They argue that eliminating vesting cliffs fosters a transient, "mercenary" workforce, which they can resist by attracting talent passionate about their specific domain, like the intersection of AI and music.
The most potent productivity gains from AI aren't just for junior staff. Seasoned professionals who combine deep domain expertise with adaptability are using AI to rapidly learn adjacent skills like design or marketing. This allows them to "collapse the skill stack" and single-handedly perform tasks that previously required multiple people.