This is Nivey, and you're listening to the Naval podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about recruiting, hiring, team, and culture.

There's a famous quote from Vinod Kosla,

the team you build is the company you build.

Or in other words, they told you it was a technology game when it's really a recruiting game. So I pulled up

a tweet from Naval from August 2025. Founders can delegate everything except recruiting, fundraising,

strategy, and product vision. Recruiting is the most important thing because you need creativity,

you need motivated people. Ideally, the early people are all geniuses. They're self-managing,

low ego, hardworking, highly competent, builders, technical, maybe one or two sellers.

But you can't watch everything. You can't micromanage everything.

The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other

people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement in veto,

that's a sad day. That's the day that the company is no longer being driven

directly by you. There's now a fly-by-wire element in between. There's some mechanical linkage going

through another human, often at a distance, and other people are not going to have the same level

of selectivity that you will as a founder. The important size at which a company starts changing

is not some arbitrary number like 20 or 30 or 40. It's the point at which the founder is not

directly recruiting and managing everyone. The moment that there are middle layers of management,

then you are somewhat disconnected from the company and your ability

to directly drive a product team that can take the company from zero to one goes away.

So we really cannot outsource recruiting. People think you can. They hire recruiters, for example.

Maybe you can outsource a little bit of sourcing, but I would even argue that's difficult.

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