Kaz Hishida

Love waking up on announcement day 😎 It's been such a wild journey that I always start my stories of the early days with "way back when", but that was only 2 years ago! Guess it's pretty incredible what's possible with 2 years (+ some change) and your dream team. We're always hiring :)

The highest-leverage thing I’ve done as a founding engineer at Serval is focus on talent.  I realized early on that if I wanted to double my impact, working twice as much was impossible (not enough hours in the day) and becoming twice as good of an engineer was really really hard. But if I could help bring in five great engineers, I’d multiply what we could build and in a much more scalable way. Especially if I then helped those five great engineers bring in their own great networks! We’ve grown from about 20 people to 160 in this last year, and more than 40% of our hires came through referrals. In engineering, that number is even higher. The traditional playbook says build a huge top of funnel through agencies, then filter down stage by stage. But that's not what the greatest organizations in the world with the absolute highest bars for talent do. The 49ers won't hold open tryouts to find their starting quarterback. They'll identify the best free agents in the market and go focus on winning them over. We do the same. Referrals give us the strongest signal we can get. The best interview loop gives us maybe eight hours with a candidate. A referrer has often worked alongside that person for years. We offer huge referral bonuses and we then work to empower our employees to earn them. We've built internal tools like Spot, which analyzes everyone's network against every job description we have open to make suggestions to our employees on who to reach out to. We have fun tools like Orbits which maps each person's referral network like a social system, helps visualize your dynasty, and doubles as a leaderboard. We also host events where employees can bring their networks to get to know the team at Serval over a fully covered game of poker or a cold plunge. Thanks to Netta Jenkins and Inc. Magazine for telling the story: lnkd.in/g3aVeVKg We’re still hiring. If you’re an exceptional engineer (or an exceptional anything), my DMs are open!

I'll Venmo you $1,000 for our next recruiting event idea. I hit two years at Serval last week. I now spend half my time on talent as we've grown from 10 to 140 people in the last year. Talent is the single most important function of any startup growing this fast. Code is now cheap and product/GTM playbooks can be copied with just a few prompts. A team that keeps coming up with what's next is the greatest advantage we have and our most defensible moat. Events have become a large part of our people-first recruiting approach and so far, we've taken candidates to Fjord's exclusive floating sauna and cold plunge in Sausalito, hosted poker nights (with everyone's first buy-in on us!), and rented out Pilates studios. Who is the most impressive engineer you know? What would make them stop what they're doing and show up? Drop your best idea in the comments. If we do it (and you are the first to have suggested it + we haven't done it before), I'll send you $1,000.

This is such a good writeup that captures how every top VC backed startup should be thinking of these roles right now as the talent wars become the decisive battleground in company building. 1000/10