When Is The Right Time For Startups To Hire?

Dalton Caldwell and Paul Buchheit discuss the right time for a startup to start hiring. One of the most common mistakes startups make is hiring too early. Counterintuitively, hiring makes a pre-PMF move more slowly rather than speeding them up. On the other hand its common for post-PMF startup to hire too slowly. Paul was employee #23 at Google and during his time at Google he interviewed and hired some of the most talented engineers in the world. Paul created the first prototype of Google's "Did you mean?" feature in Google search and would ask Google applicants for ideas on how to improve the feature. He ended up interviewing and recommending that Google hire Noam Shazeer, one of the creators of the transformer. In addition, Paul and Dalton discuss Ilya Sutskever's interview for the role of OpenAI cofounder far before it was called OpenAI.