Aug 13, 2026
Notes on hypergrowth from @azure (Stripe felt very similar but I was more of a passenger there)
Recruiting:
- make best friends with recruiting. Lining up schedules alone is a Herculean undertaking. Without a great relationship with recruiting the whole enterprise is doomed
- push everyone to refer friends and colleagues, that is best. But at this pace not nearly sufficient. You need great sourcers and a strong cold pipeline
- teach your team to RLHF sourcers. Nobody wants to spend time on this, but this upfront investment will pay off 10x
- bring recruiters homemade cookies or smtg once in a while. They’re used to being treated transactionally, treat them as humans and they’ll go to bat for you
Existing team:
- their sanity will be strained. They have to do existing work, and spend a third of their time interviewing, and train new hires. It’s a crazy amount of work, redouble your efforts to support them
- still growth is energizing. Everyone will be tired, happy and vibes will be good
- value of existing ppl’s time will go up 10x. They’ll bottleneck everything since everyone around them will be new.
- train them on everything— how to talk to recruiters, how to interview, how to train new hires, how to protect their time, how to prioritize.
- not everyone from existing team will be happy with this new reality. Some good ppl will self-select out
- the job of existing ppl is to mint productive new hires. Teach them not to be resentful, in fact the more new hires they mint, the more authority they’ll have (which is counterintuitive)
Interview loop:
- deep topic so limiting to what’s relevant to hypergrowth
- frontload tough filters. It’s tempting to make those easier to give candidates a chance in onsite, but at this pace you need to filter as early as possible, you’ll have no choice
- get current team involved in interview loop design. When they spend 1/3 their time interviewing and everyone around them is new, they need to feel they have influence on the process
- candidate experience is first to go. Push everyone to keep it great. Maybe not strictly necessary but some things you gotta do on principle
- you better know what you want and select for it ruthlessly. When you’re hiring a few ppl you can maybe afford eg a few good coders who aren’t great communicators. If you’re tripling your team and hire mostly bad communicators you will have done irreparable damage
New hires:
- your current managers and engineers will not be able to handhold or allocate tasks. So select for ppl who can operate without handholding amidst chaos
- set up some standard training process, then iterate on it, it’s like a mini-product on its own
- some ppl have a much higher tolerance for chaos than others, not everyone will work out
- this is eternal September, your culture will change. Pick a minimum core of your culture you’re draconian about preserving, let new hires influence the rest (it will happen anyway, all you get to do is guide it)
- you’ll find in this environment ppl onboard at wildly different rates. Some laggards will eventually catch up and do great, others won’t
Tons of other stuff, eg how to allocate ppl to teams, how to train your managers, how to make new managers productive, how to evolve the org, how to steer the craziness, etc. This is already getting pretty long, will maybe do part ii later.