@a16z 30-40% on hiring is the part most product teams skip, because iteration speed is basically a people problem dressed up as a process problem.
@a16z That much time on hiring makes sense when the product itself is moving every week. The team becomes the operating system.
@a16z so the constraint moved from engineers to who can write a check for 2 billion, that's not removing a bottleneck
@a16z 30-40% on hiring sounds insane until you realize most AI companies spend 0% on it and wonder why they can't ship
@a16z The future is bright. Semper Fidelis
@a16z then why does it sucks so much?
Martin Casado says Cursor's founders spend 30-40% of their time on hiring and culture, and that focus is how they iterate so fast: "A lot of these AI companies that I work with are so research-heavy. If you're not working on a new model architecture, it's kind of hard to…