Founder of 1st10 đ± Building early engineering teams in SF/NY | xBinc Founder (built Stripe, Ripple, Airbnb, etc), acquired by Robinhood in â21. Dad.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined November 2013
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Happy Labor Day đ Given Iâve dedicated my career to helping people create their own Labor stories, I thought Iâd share mine:
-I graduated in 2000 with a degree in Bio from UC Irvine. After exploring careers in medicine, dentistry and law, I followed my passion into business
-My first job was with @PIMCO where I stayed for 1 year working in their compliance department. I learned at a young age that the corporate life wasnât for me.
-I then started my first business called Dice Media. We built interactive websites for local small businesses. We pioneered something called Dice Cards which were entire websites built into mini CDs. They were cool but never took off.
-I needed a job so stumbled into a small recruiting agency called Brelon Page. There I learned the ins and outs of full desk contingency recruiting. During my first year, I billed 120k and made 7 hires mostly in the space of Civil Engineering. Think pre-cursor to the real estate boom of â03-08.
-In 2002, after 1 year at Brelon Page, I started Binc. We specialized in tech and innovated in the areas of people culture and recruiting service models.
-I ran Binc for 19 years. We did contingency for the first 7 years and then in 2009, pioneered what the industry now refers to as embedded RPO for the tech industry.
-Our timing turned out to be pretty impeccable. We rode the entire ZIRP decade to 150 employees and 30M ARR, which we hit in 2019. We never took funding, were entirely revenue generated and always maintained profitability. During this decade we specialized in early engineering team buildouts and were responsible for early buildouts for industry leaders @Pinterest @Airbnb @Square @Ripple @stripe and many many more.
-In 2021 when recruiting was peak market, we decided to do something crazy and sold our company to @RobinhoodApp. Our 80-person team joined Robinhoodâs internal team to help power the next stage of their growth ambitions.
-I worked at Robinhood for 2 years. My first year was spent working with their Corp Dev team to acquire companies that employed top industry talent. Together we bought Say Technologies, a shareholder empowerment platform and Cove Markets, a crypto trading platform. My second year was spent leading their Talent Acquisition function. This involved leading the ~100-person team through two layoffs and a hiring freeze to a place of sustainability and productivity.
-I left Robinhood in May of this year and am exploring the very early seedlings for whatâs next.
-As the next chapter of my career develops, Iâll continue posting stories and lessons from throughout my career and build in public perspectives on current market experiences and happenings.
Hope you enjoyed and thanks again for following đ
Try recruiting in this environment đ
Itâs almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone whoâs working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But whatâs happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago youâre likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
Iâve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains werenât wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly werenât either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. Itâs a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didnât work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
incredible honeypot for the top agentic builders
Announcing No Limit: a bot building tournament hosted by @Sequoia, @citsecurities and @OpenAI.
Teams of 1 or 2 get 60 minutes to build a pokerbot from scratch.
Agents play thousands of games across six scored rounds.
Open to university students and recent grads (â25 or â26).
Regionals in Boston, Pittsburgh and the Bay Area in early November. Top five teams from each fly to the Finals. $100K grand prize.
What should AI learn from social mediaâs mistakes?
I invited human rights leader and Meta Oversight Board member Suzanne Nossel onto the podcast to discuss what AI companies owe their users.
In this clip - if AI goes badly wrong, would we know and could we stop it?
I see this happening in real time and its just wild!!
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest heâs ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
The biggest difference between technical and non-technical founders is that technical founders know how to describe what they're building in a way that everyone can understand and get excited about. That's the key to successful leading and hiring.
Case in point, I worked on a search for a non-technical founder who did their best with this but it ultimately ended in a failed search. Now working on a similar search for a strong ML leader and within seconds it clicked in a way it previously wasn't able to even after 6 months of trying.
If a startup is having the same issues with different recruiters, it's most likely not the recruiter :/
Philip Su starts at Anthropic today.
I asked him how engineers can stay valuable as AI gets better.
âYou donât have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun your friend.â
AI makes doing the minimum easier. His advice is to just use it to outwork your peers.
Consumer AI product built by a repeat founding team backed by the top investors in the space.
Based team based in SF. Hit me up if you want to get onto this rocketship đ
Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you.
Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when youâre alone with your newborn. On your commute when youâre anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet.
The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who arenât trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations.
This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year.
Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m.
To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)
I donât think thatâs what happened. I simply think that talent services from a venture firm the size of a16z is no longer a differentiator in winning new deals. a16z is investing in media, community and thereâs simply less value in paying for a team to make intros. They also automated a lot of what the team was manually doing so no longer need the team that size.
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Anyone know which recruiting leader is in charge of this? Someone from Gov or Tech?
On our task force to eliminate fraud, we're taking every step possible to end the abuse of your tax dollars and protect the millions of Americans who use federal programs in their day to day lives.
Today, I'm proud to announce that the @WHFraudTF is partnering with @USTechForce so we can recruit the country's best software engineers to join the fight.
As your Vice President, I'm calling on America's best and brightest to answer this call, apply for these roles, and join our team. Help us out, your country needs you.
From recent conversations with founders building in the software / web / app space, few things are becoming clear.
Sites, apps and software are currently built for humans and we are in the early stages of all this being rebuilt for humans and agents in the mid term and for agents only in the long term.
Read that again.
Sites and software will eventually be used by agents only. That means humans will primarily interact with agents instead of with the site or software directly.
Agent will be the new interface. We will communicate with our agent via chat or voice from our phone and computer or via new devices not yet invented. No more clicks, no more search, no more surf. Weâll just tell an agent what we want and the agent will interact with the world of sites and software to make that wish a reality.
Sites and software will still need to exist. This is far from the death of them!
But they will be for agents to interact with, no longer for humans.
Something interesting to think about is how the agentic version of site and software will need to evolve to maximize whatever the agent will need to be successful. Just like today everything exists to maximize human needs. Things will need to look a certain way, function a certain way, allow for certain functionality. Weâll of course have agent-native versions and our current versions will be rebuilt or die.
Right now sites, apps and software is already being built for human and agent interactivity. Weâre also seeing versions for pure agent to agent.
When this transition is complete, humans wonât care much about whatâs happening beneath the surface, much like we donât care much about whatâs happening inside of a computer.
It just works and thatâs the way things will just work once this agentic era is upon us.
Whatâs the biggest culture shock when leaving big tech for an early startup?
Itâs a question that comes up often in my conversations with engineers, so I asked Kobi Hudson who spent ten years at Waymo before joining Coval as a founding engineer.
He said it's the freedom to build with whatever tools and models he wanted.
âIt felt like zero to 100.â
Kobiâs move happened at a different point in AI adoption (mid 2025). Today, engineers at both big tech and startups are building with AI. But having access to AI and having the freedom to explore the latest in AI are different things.
Can you try the model that dropped yesterday? Give an agent more access? Rethink your whole workflow because you found something that works better?
Thatâs the freedom I hear founding engineers talk about and something engineers considering the jump want to understand. Fewer constraints on how you build, more room to see whatâs possible.
If youâve made the move, does that match your experience?
Link to the full episode in thread.
Jack Johnson show tonight at Hollywood Bowl had a 5 year old girl holding a sign that itâs her first concert and she wants to sing âHomeâ with Jack.
The crowd saw the sign and got Jacks attention. He agreed and brought her on stage.
She wasnât shy and went up to the mic. And she nailed it! 5 year old little girl.
Sweetest thing Iâve ever seen.
I did manage to get it on video. Hope you enjoy as much as I did.