Aestus Value Lab

Eric Schmidt on the controversial hiring rules that built Google, and the beloved "glue people" he says you don't need at all: Schmidt admits the early rules were unpopular, even inside the company. "One of the rules is that we didn't want to hire your friends, which always was upsetting. We also didn't want to hire anybody from what were considered to be lesser universities. And so we also wanted to hire people who had very high GPAs." That meant saying no to people who, by most measures, deserved a yes: "So the constant problem was that somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, very hard working, who was not from a great university, did not have a very good GPA and we would not hire them." He concedes the policy has since been softened. But he doesn't apologise for it: "So that was controversial and we've relaxed that a little bit now. But the fact of the matter is it got us to where we were today because it produced these high IQ generalists from prestigious universities." Then there was the second rule, built on a lesson Schmidt learned before Google, at Novell. He calls them "glue people": "The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups and they assist in activity. They are glue and they're very, very loyal and people love them and you don't need them at all." The problem wasn't that they were bad people. It was that they cost speed: "At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people because they were getting in the way because they slowed everything down." And once inside, they were almost impossible to remove: "And every time I'd get rid of in one group, they'd show up in another group and they'd transfer and get rehired and all that." When @ericschmidt raised this with Larry and Sergey, Larry's answer was to stop glue people before they ever got in: "And Larry said, yeah, let's just review all the hiring." "So guess what? From that moment on, we reviewed every offer packet. Literally everyone." The review was strict enough that even Schmidt's own preferred candidates got caught: "And anybody who smelled or looked like a glue person, plus the people that Larry and Sergey thought had backgrounds that I liked that they didn't, would all be flagged. And so anybody who sort of met the original profile, they'd go right through."

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You would have made billions if you gave seed checks to everyone who was at @alexandr_wang’s 19th birthday party: - Jeff Yan (@chameleon_jeff) went on to start Hyperliquid (~$20B) - @ScottWu46 went on to start Cognition ($48B) - @thejessezhang went on to start Decagon ($4.5B) And Wang himself who started Scale AI, and got $14.3B from Meta for 49% of it. Wang explains: “I was doing a winternship at a trading firm called HRT. There were 12 of us, almost all of whom were students at either Harvard or MIT. I recently met up with the founder of HRT and they were talking about, ‘We're starting to do some private investments.’ I was like, ‘Just invest into the interns! All the interns get seed checks!’”

Chamath says Anthropic should sacrifice valuation to raise at least $200 billion, because even that barely buys the compute needed to survive a correction “Here’s my very specific thing about why I think they should price it to clear the market for $200 billion—and I’m specific about that number. They need, in my estimate, at least $200 billion. If you want to be super safe, a quarter-trillion gets the job done. “What does the price need to be to attract that incremental dollar off the sidelines? Can they raise $80 billion in an IPO at $1.7, $1.8 or $1.9 trillion? I think so, handily. Can they raise $100 billion? Maybe it’s pushing it. At $150 billion, I think you need to be back down to $1.5 trillion.” JCal: “You’re saying you want them to raise more money at a lower valuation so they have a war chest.” Chamath: “$150 billion at $1.5 trillion is not enough. $200 billion barely gets them a few gigawatts. That is the bottom-line math if Anthropic is going to go through and survive an eventual correction. “I think it’s much better for them to have $200 billion to $250 billion today than to try to ring the bell at $1.9 or $2 trillion for $80 billion, file a mixed shelf—which takes about six months—and hope the markets are in line. “I just think there’s more risk in the future than there is today. Why take the risk? Price it to clear the market.”