Many of the best ideas are increasingly obvious today. Obvious in that they're extremely legible -- easy to pitch, and see the path forward and the cascade of beliefs that have to be true.

We're now at a unique inflection point where talent acquisition has become the highest-variance skill that almost-solely separates mediocre founders from exceptional ones. Everything else is converging toward best practices. Recruiting though maintains a lot of art

the compounding math of great people

Let's do some simple math. Assume individual productivity follows a power law. In these distributions, performance is right-skewed: let's say the median performer produces at rate 1 and the 90th percentile at rate 3.

Now consider two recruiting strategies for a 5-person team:

strategy A (median hiring):
Sample 5 people from around the 50th percentile
Expected team output: 5 × 1 = 5 units

strategy B (exceptional hiring):
Sample 5 people from the 90th percentile
Expected team output: 5 × 3 = 15 units

But this assumes productivity is purely additive. In reality, there are collaboration multipliers. Exceptional people working together don't just add their individual contributions -- they create knowledge spillovers, faster iteration cycles, and higher standards that compound team performance.

If we model this as a modest linear effect where exceptional teams get a 2x collaboration bonus:

A 6:1 output. Small improvements in your ability to recruit from the right tail of the distribution create disproportionate advantages in total team capability.

But here's where the expected value calculus gets interesting: most people think combining talent creates linear gains, or worse, sublinear ones due to coordination overhead. The naive math says if you're a 90th percentile founder going solo, why take 50% dilution to work with another 90th percentile founder? You're trading 100% of X for 50% of 2X. That feels like a wash, or even a loss when you factor in coordination costs.

This framing misses the superlinear returns of exceptional people working together. Two 90th percentile founders don't create 2X value -- they might create 10X value through complementary expertise and emergent problem-solving that neither could achieve alone. The expected value equation becomes: 50% of 10X >> 100% of 1X.

The math becomes more compelling as you add more exceptional people.

my investment filter

My first-pass filter for early-stage investments is embarrassingly simple: Would I work for these founders?

When I invest in a company, I give my friends similar guidance: "This team is so good I'd consider joining them."

This is a necessary but insufficient condition. The real differentiation over time comes from execution on the thing that actually matters: can this person attract 10x contributors?

equity reframing

Given the growing importance of talent, we need significantly larger option pools.

The SV standard of giving founding engineers 0.5% feels like a relic from when great ideas were scarce. Now that many software playbooks are well-documented, the scarce resource is convincing exceptional people to bet their next few years on your specific version of a legible idea.

We need to do better by the people who take the biggest risks.

When the upside is superlinear and timelines are compressed, you need to make joining more attractive than competing. That means more equity, more upside, more skin in the game for everyone who matters.

two skills --> one focus

These observations distill into two core competencies that venture founders (and venture investors) need to develop:

  1. understanding motivation: what actually drives exceptional people to leave comfortable situations for uncertain ones?

  2. understanding incentives: how do you structure deals (both equity and non-equity) that make collaboration more attractive than competition?

Understanding motivation and incentives prove to be the highest-leverage skills in a world where the biggest constraint is attracting people who could easily start their own competing companies.

If you've written about how you convinced your smartest friends to join you or have very strong opinions here, I'd love to chat. The playbook for talent magnetism is still being written -- I'd like to get better at this. Send me your frameworks, schemes, and war stories w/ team formation. I'd appreciate it.