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This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
The billboard didn’t say “Listen Labs.” It didn’t say anything about hiring. It consisted of just a plain white background with “https://” and a single line of grouped numbers hanging over Nob Hill, San Francisco.
Last month, Alfred Wahlforss, the startup’s CEO, posted on X that whoever cracked the code and completed a subsequent challenge would win a trip to Berlin and get on the guest list for the ultra-exclusive nightclub Berghain.
One of the more elaborate tech startup recruiting stunts in recent memory worked, Wahlforss later told me. Within days, the billboard garnered millions of views online, attracted media coverage, collected 10,000 email sign-ups, and led to roughly 60 interviews with potential candidates.
In recent conversations I’ve had with Wahlforss and other startup founders, it’s clear that, even for well-funded firms, attracting top technical talent is more challenging than ever. “We are spending a ton of money to not even advertise the company, but just to advertise us to engineers,” according to Wahlforss, whose company has raised $27 million from Sequoia. “It has been extremely challenging to hire good people. I have a friend who’s a high school dropout, and he can work at OpenAI and make like $2 million a year.”
“You spend hours with people who end up rejecting you and just go to Anthropic. It’s very, very painful.”
Wahlforss told me about a recent candidate who loved cycling. His cofounder showed up at the candidate’s house with a high-end carbon road bike. The gesture helped push the candidate to turn down other offers. More often, though, he said it’s impossible to compete with the biggest names in AI and Big Tech. “You spend hours with people who end up rejecting you and just go to Anthropic. It’s very, very painful.”
You don’t have to look far to hear similar stories of rejection. Austin Hughes, the CEO of Unify, an AI sales platform that has raised over $50 million, commissioned a painting for a coveted candidate. But OpenAI offered triple the compensation that Unify could provide. The candidate took the money and kept the painting.
Jesse Zhang, the CEO of Decagon, is feeling the same squeeze despite running a fast-growing startup currently valued at $1.5 billion. “It’s one of the things I’m thinking about day to day,” he told me when I asked about the difficulty of recruiting. Decagon has pulled the classic levers to attract candidates, such as hosting fancy dinners with its investor, Accel, and offering courtside tickets to Warriors games. Zhang said he even drove to the South Bay recently and met with a candidate’s family.
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