february 11, 2026
hiring has always been extremely important for a company’s long-term success. but it feels like the talent wars have never been hotter than they are currently.
one reason is the huge pay packages we’re seeing offered by the labs (openai, meta, etc). when zuck got really aggressive and started offering billion-dollar pay packages, it forced others in the ecosystem to become equally aggressive. openai set aside a ~$50 billion employee stock grant pool for current and future equity awards (given their valuation, the percentage isn’t crazy, but by volume it’s a huge war chest). mercor is offering multi million-dollar signing bonuses to employees from competitor micro1 (and these could go to new-grad hires). there are plenty of other examples. if you’re a young, extremely talented person in tech right now, there are a lot of options open.
another thing i’ve heard from portfolio founders is that the founding engineer persona is getting harder to find. with an abundance of capital in the ecosystem, vc’s are finding the people that usually would been a great fit to join companies early, and offering cash to build their own things instead. when you look at the economics, this is a much better deal for the founding engineer (if they join a company, they’re often taking on almost equal risk as the founder but with orders of magnitude less equity).
there are also more startups each year competing for this pool of talent (due to many reasons - being a startup founder is more of a status symbol today than it previously was, software infrastructure to support startup operations like aws / stripe / etc is abundant, the playbooks for how to build companies are proliferating which allows people to feel more comfortable getting started, etc).
recruiting has always been a full-time job for founders, but it’s especially hard these days.
some founders i’ve talked to recently think of recruiting as a very long-term project. they’re willing to hire an in-house, full-time recruiter earlier than others. they allocate a more significant portion of their time to meet talent and build strategies to recruit more. they are willing to wait for a year or more on a potential hire, keeping them warm until the right time comes for moves to be made.
some founders use good external recruiters to shortcut parts of the process. it’s better than the ceo themselves spending hours on linkedin sales nav each day and setting up a daisy-chain of outbound automation tools to follow up with good candidates. maybe if your goal is to hire a bunch of people very quickly, this is a good approach, especially if you find a recruiter that really understands your ideal candidate well (easier said than done).
a lot of recruiters seem to try and find the “minimum viable candidate,” and then add as many of those as possible to the top of the funnel (which theoretically should lead to conversion with enough numbers). you can play the “coverage” game this way - build a warm database of 50-500 engineers that seem technical and entrepreneurial, get to know them and collect their preferences on what kinds of places they’d like to join next. this does work out a lot of the time.
talent-obsessed founders who are comfortable with hiring people over a longer time horizon, may have a different approach. these days, a lot of people talk about cursor as a gold standard for hiring great talent. today, they have the advantage of high candidate conversion due to their brand. but their hiring methods have been very similar since the very beginning (where they did not have as much of a brand advantage). and hiring took a lot longer for this reason. you have to be comfortable with no immediate results for a while.
different hiring approaches work for different companies - it’s often the preferences, procedures, and personality of the founder that determines things like this. there is no one-size-fits-all method for hiring. in fact, if you try to replicate the exact hiring playbook that another company has used, it may not work for you, for a number of reasons (different company culture, team size, industry, etc).
you usually want to get talent recommendations from people you trust. the best case is, you can get someone you respect a lot to refer the top five smartest people they have worked directly with. but even if they haven’t worked directly with someone on a project, it still means a lot to get their general endorsement of the person.
in order to get recommendations from people you trust, you can directly ask them, or do things to build the relationship with them and stay top-of-mind, or directly compensate them in some way. you could host dinners / events, and ask them to invite their interesting friends to these. you could directly go through their linkedin or twitter connections and highlight the profiles that stand out.
getting people pre-vetted early on in the process helps you spend less time on the work trial, which is time-intensive but really the only way you can truly gauge someone’s technical ability (like shipping a project end-to-end) and culture fit (for obvious reasons, hard to gauge virtually).
across the board, i hear about founders fighting increasingly hard to find and retain really talented people that resonate with their company culture. it’s a great time to be an operator in love with, and good at, your craft.