High agency is the ultimate hiring criterion

Finding people who are high agency and work with urgency, if I was hiring five people today, those are some of the top two characteristics that I would look for in people because you can take on the world if you have people who have high agency and not needing to get 50 people's different consensus.

They hear something from our customers about a challenge that they're having, and they're already pushing on what the solution for them is and not waiting for all the other things to happen that... People just go and do it and solve the problem.

We work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like? What is it that we're building? What use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super important is high agency and high autonomy. I can figure out things that are tangential to me that I don't need other specialties, so to speak.

I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI.

The most important characteristics of those individuals are they're really determined to win and they don't give up when things are hard and they have an internal motivation that's just really infectious to people around them, which is how they end up building really good teams around them.