Cursor 的高人才密度招聘：从“漏斗淘汰”转向“逐人设计”

Lenny Rachitsky You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite, high-talent density teams. Let's start with how people do it wrong. Something you call the funnel of doom.

Adam Ward Companies think about recruiting like a funnel. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20% of those are all high. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. In your mind like, "Hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people." And you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating t

hose people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom.

The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, "Hey, Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know?" That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, "Hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?"

Lenny Rachitsky When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything you think is important to look for?

Adam Ward Recruiters are excellent at 90% to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they kind of are useless, but they're kind of great at this edge of adrenaline rush, busy. You want to find those people.

Lenny Rachitsky What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term?

Adam Ward When you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is...

Lenny Rachitsky Today, my guest is Adam Ward. Adam is known in the Valley as the most effective recruiting leader at building elite, high-talent density teams. He co-founded an independent recruiting firm called Growth by Design, which Cursor acquired fully last year, which is not something that you often hear and is a testament to how good he and his team are and how important talent is right now in today's market.

Adam is now head of talent at Cursor, helping them scale and build one of the most talent-dense teams in the world. Prior to starting his own firm, Adam led global recruiting at Pinterest, growing the company from 200 to over 2,000 employees. And before that, he led a global team of 65 recruiters across 10 offices at Facebook, helping them scale Facebook's tech org from 1,000 to over 10,000 employees.

If hiring the best people is your number one priority as it should be, this conversation will open your mind up to what it takes to do that. Adam gets super tactical and extremely specific, and you are going to thank me for inviting Adam on this podcast to share all of this incredible advice. A huge thank you to Bree Wolfson, Janet Fishberg, Jill Macri, Mike Joyner, and Tim Kendall for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation.

Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Adam Ward. Adam, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Adam Ward Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Lenny Rachitsky You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring, recruiting, building teams. How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the market and the hiring market we're in today?

Adam Ward If there's a scale, it's an 11. But yeah, I do think there are similarities to some other markets we've been in over time. You mentioned the years. There was a moment in time where a lot of companies were moving to mobile and there literally was not a mobile engineer. An iOS engineer was not a thing, but there was a scramble for talent to build your mobile app and things like that.

There was this moment that was the thing and it has some similarities to that market and moment. I think that really the difference here is everything here is just so compressed. So that mobile moment was two years maybe where there was no mobile engineers and then they were like mobile bootcamp, mobile engineer bootcamps, all these things. And now we're in days, we're in weeks.

There are no months or year measures right now. And so what makes us feel very different.

Lenny Rachitsky The other thing that feels very different about this market is there's many people doing extremely well. It's the most competitive, as you said, 11 out of 10 for specific roles. A lot of other people are just really struggling, having a really hard time finding jobs.

Adam Ward Yeah, it's a tale of two cities, really. You can read back-to-back headlines of NBA salary offers to a new grad PhD, and the next line being a blue chip company laying off 10% of workforce. How can both of these things be true? And you see this shift of how companies are doing work and getting work done.

And I really believe we're in this moment where there's this resettlement of talent and labor and how work gets done. And I really believe that there will be a resettlement and there'll be a shift and this will come back. But I feel like we're in one of the largest gaps of those worlds right now that I believe will, and I want to believe will come back closer together.

Lenny Rachitsky This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies.

WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seat stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Strip

e for enterprise features.

Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. What are roles that are kind of trending up in the most in demand right now? And what are maybe less and less in demand?

And you have a really unique perspective because not only you're at Cursor now, but before that you had your own independent agency working with a ton of different companies. So you got to see across a lot of different places. What's kind of trending up? What's most in demand and what's maybe softer now?

Adam Ward Yeah, I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but this forward-deployed engineer, this technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what can be for some audiences in a company, a very technical and maybe overwhelming product or helping companies think about moving from token maxing to optimizing, maxing to optimizing.

And so that's I think a new skill as CFOs start to get the bill coming in. Companies are able to help partner with them to think about what's the best solution for them. So that's a really unique skill because you're deeply technical yourself, you understand the product, but you can also walk into a room with executives and leaders and help conjugate some of that and then even help them deploy that into their workforce. So I think that's a real supply demand issue right now.

I think maybe the thing that is waning, I would say, is the specialized technical person. The person who is... Because I think you almost see this squeezing together of engineer product design in some ways where we would love a designer who could actually be more of a design engineer. And we want that super deep technical engineer that has a little bit more stronger product sense.

So I think the people who are maybe very narrow, very deep and overly specialized in a way are waning in the same way along that vein might also be the new grad who just hasn't had enough experience to be able to do that, where a product like Cursor or others can do some of that work right now.

Lenny Rachitsky This is extremely interesting. I haven't heard it put this way before. Interestingly with the FDE role, it feels similar to the mobile example you shared where very few people have actually been forward-deployed engineers. So what's kind of the, I don't know, the look of a person that can become an FDE?

Adam Ward Yeah, I actually think it is that engineer. It is that person who maybe was a full stack engineer in three to five years ago, is now maybe actually that forward-deployed engineer. And you talk to some of these folks and they actually unlock something in them. They're kind of moving out of the terminal and moving in into the company and into the customers and clients.

And for the right person, that's super energizing, unlocks another chapter or maybe an unexpected chapter in their career.

Lenny Rachitsky That's interesting. I was expecting you to say AI researchers, so this is interesting. And imagine because there's not as many of those roles.

Adam Ward I think so. I think that's a very defined set. And so I feel like it's a very clear bracket of what that is and how many there are and where they are. And I think that sometimes the bigger challenges are the nebulous things or the very new things that I think are sometimes just as challenging as the scarcity ones of an AI or ML engineer.

Lenny Rachitsky Just as a final question along these lines, what about just the core product design engineering roles? Are those kind of steady as they've been? Is one increasing, decreasing? How's that looking?

Adam Ward I think they're hot. But I think you probably see a lot of conversation out there around this where I think we're getting a little bit back in a good way to the craft of things. And so if you think about what AI can do in the design world, it can also create a lot of slop in its own way. And so I'm an optimist. You'll probably hear that throughout.

Lenny Rachitsky Same.

Adam Ward I think it's just a better way to live. But I think what will hopefully help us get back is to the craft of what we do and maybe an appreciation for it. And I see that in the design world too.

Lenny Rachitsky And is that in saying ICs are more in demand and especially ICs that have good taste, good judgment? Is that kind of the-

Adam Ward I think so. Yeah. I think we've seen this for maybe the last 12 months, the rise of the power of IC. And the recognition and appreciation for that work, I think has come almost in a full circle moment for them. But I think taste, decision-making, problem solving, these characteristics, curiosity in all the good ways I think are coming back up to the surface.

Lenny Rachitsky Awesome. Okay. So let me zoom out and frame the conversation that I'm hoping we have broadly. You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite, high-talent density teams. So many people kept telling me you are the person that does this better than anyone else. This is every company's and founder's dream, build the highest talent density team. So I'm going to go through this in a sequence.

Let's start with something you call the funnel of doom hiring. Talk about the funnel of doom. What is the funnel of doom?

Adam Ward Yeah. And this is a concept I got to recognize my very first as an intern actually in 1998 at a company called Trilogy, which is somewhat of an infamous company around recruiting and it's kind of where I learned to trade. My very first manager, Jeff Daniel, we did this campus tour around the country talking to CS students. And that's where I first heard the term and he coined that term. So I had to acknowledge that.

But I think what the funnel did forever, almost forever, as you think about the recruiting history, companies think about recruiting like a funnel, maybe akin to a sales funnel where they think about different stages, pass through rates and things like that. And when you think about how most companies have recruited over these last several decades, it's really been candidates come from three buckets. They apply, they are activated or sourced or they're referred.

But if you think about for a lot of companies who think about talent density, typically referrals and sourcing or activation of passive talent is really the focus. And when you even narrow further on this source talent, this is how most companies think about it. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20 people will reply just for round numbers. So 20% of those will reply. By definition, that is not the top 20%.

That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day for them. Good day for you, bad day for them. And so you're starting with a suboptimal set. You're not starting with the top 20% even if that's what. And then the way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. So this remainder hiring is the output of the funnel of doom. And when you say that out loud, you're like, that's kind of messed up.

Adam Ward If I think about building a talent-dense company over time, is that really the best approach? Or does that kind of get me just above average over time, assuming I have really good interview process and hygiene and all these things? You kind of regress to the mean over time as you get to volume.

And so we just think about this in a different way is what if you had confidence upfront of who the top 20% was, and then you use your assessment process to validate that thesis of who those are? That seems like a better... So there's this funnel doom, but there's within a funnel doom, there's this pillar of excellence. What if you started with the pillar of excellence and went from there versus having this wide funnel?

Because imagine how expensive that is to do remainder based hiring and you hire the person who drops to the bottom.

Lenny Rachitsky I love this, especially hearing this. This is how hiring has been forever. And just hear you describe it, it's clear this is not optimal. Why hasn't this changed ever?

Adam Ward There is something detrimental about comparing it to a sales funnel. Because in a sales funnel, as a salesperson, you're typically selling a widget, a piece of software, an item. Those things are relatively static and rational. In recruiting, you have an irrational unit of a hiring manager and recruiter, and then another rational unit of a candidate.

And so to believe that things are transactional and linear and passed through in the same ways I think is a bit of a fallacy. But sales has been around for hundreds of years, a long time. Recruiting as a craft or this is like 50 years, 40 years. So we're behind on it, but as humans, we often try to relate a problem to another problem that we know.

And so I think this connectedness to sales has been somewhat detrimental to companies as they think about doing this in a more strategic way.

Lenny Rachitsky So let's follow this thread and help make it very clear what you're describing here. The way I've heard you describe this is you treat every hire as an executive recruiting sort of hire. And the goal is to go for the top 1% of people out in the world versus who it drops in the funnel. Talk more about just that kind of way of thinking about it.

Adam Ward So if you've ever worked on a senior specialized hire leadership role done well, there's roughly three main steps. One is scoping. And so if you think about going after the 1%, the most important step is getting really clear on what 1% means to you. And so if you've ever heard that phrase, "I'll know it when I see it. I'll know what great looks like." Actually, you won't.

You won't know because you haven't spent the time objectively identifying what great looks like. And so when you think about scoping, if we can just dive into that cornerstone piece, really good scoping is thinking about what are the skills and experiences you're looking for. You stack rank these things, you get really clear objectively before you talk to any candidate, but it sets up your entire process. It sets up your sourcing strategy.

It sets up your pitch for them because you're asking questions like, why is this role important?What would success look like?

It really helps you craft those things. It also helps you set up your assessment process of what you're going to be assessing against. And it helps you think about that close of why this person and why this role is going to have big impact here. So that I think piece of the hiring process is underinvested in, but in a leadership search that is often known to be a really strong cornerstone.

So let's say you take this really good scoping and then you pair it with really good market mapping intelligence and signals to give you confidence of who the very best people are. So when you're doing a leadership search, for example, you're like, okay, there's really in your mind like, "Hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people." And so that approach, I think you can do at scale if you do that really good scoping, you get really cl

ear on what that looks like.

And then you take that list of 50 people, those targets, and you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel or doom large population.

Lenny Rachitsky Amazing. I imagine everyone listening to this is going to be like, "We need Adam on our team ASAP." Unfortunately, you're locked in at a company. And so we're going to do our best to try to extract as much wisdom as we can in this conversation because you have a job. So this is great. So the three steps here that you walk through of how to approach hiring from this perspective, the way that executives are hired, this idea of going after top 1%. So step one was be very clear o

n what top percent looks like.

So just to mirror back what you just shared, be clear on the skills you need and stack rank, here's the skills we need from this person, what experiences we're looking for and stack rank that. Talk about why this role is impactful and just why this is so important. Is there anything else there just to flesh that out?

Adam Ward Those are the general buckets. Every company will have other specific things that really matter. But yeah, those would be the things. And remember, things you're not asking are what companies are they from? These are objective, somewhat transferable things versus trying to piggyback off of someone else's process or definition of great.

Because we just said almost every company's doing this wrong or has company doing funnel doom. So why would we mirror or map someone else's process that we feel like maybe wasn't perfect?

Adam Ward And your company is different, your product is different. And so you owe it to yourself to identify what does great look like for you and who's going to be successful in this role in this product versus what was successful for someone else in a process that maybe you don't have full confidence in any way.

Lenny Rachitsky So you're saying specifically don't focus on, and it's a trap to focus on the logos on the resume.

Adam Ward I think so. Yeah. There are clearly vintages of companies when you're like, "Hey, this team at this company at this time did fantastic things." And possibly because that person was on that team at that company at that time, they are great. Possibly. That can be shorthand, but both companies jump to that almost immediately.

Lenny Rachitsky Awesome. Okay. Step two is mapping out and finding basically the top 50. What are tools that help you do that? Is it like LinkedIn? Is it something else?

Adam Ward I think it's a combination of things, but I think where we typically start is a set of people who we trust in terms of having high taste in talent. But I think the mistake though, and that's an obvious point, but the mistake that most companies make is they'll say, "Hey, Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know?" That is the worst question you can ask.

The better question to ask is, "Hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?" You have to put these very specific characteristics or skills or needs for your team.

And then that's way easier for you to conjure up people that way than this broad question of who's the best person.

Lenny Rachitsky And I imagine that maps to step one, which is where you map the skills, experiences.

Adam Ward Correct. So the questions you're asking are mapping back to that cornerstone work that you did in step one. So when you ask very targeted questions to a set of people, you actually start to triangulate around the same names. You're like, "Ah, Lenny mentioned them, but so did Sally. Let's put this person on the list, on the target list."

Lenny Rachitsky Okay. So part of the strategy here is you talk to people you trust who are awesome, whose tastes you trust, ask them these questions. What else helps you find these people in the world?

Adam Ward So if you think about, let's pull out the set of characteristics. Okay. The characteristics of someone we want is really curious, systems thinker, whatever they might be, maybe two or three things. Then you're thinking about what companies also share that approach to how they hire.

And you could literally probably do a quick Boolean or AI String and be like, "Hey, look at all the job openings in the world among these 100 companies, which ones also say these characteristics matter?" So you kind of think about, "Ooh, where could they have maybe picked up some of these skills for a company who also said that matters as well?

" And so then you start to build company lists that aren't the normal list you have, but they might show up there too, but let's validate it through the things that we objectively said we wanted for us.

Lenny Rachitsky It's so interesting. Systems thinking has come up on the last four podcasts- Systems thinking has come up on the last four podcasts I've done. Such a trending up attribute people are looking for these days.

Adam Ward Yeah, I think it's always been there in a little bit, but I think it's just become really accentuated now in this era.

Lenny Rachitsky When you hear the term systems thinking, what's a way you describe what that actually means when people hear that term?

Adam Ward I learned this pretty early, maybe in the second company I worked for, and it comes around to a fundamental question of what problem are we trying to solve? And so when I think about systems thinking or when I'm sitting around, I'm like, "What is the fundamental root problem that we're trying to solve?" And then, "How do we take this larger problem and break into really small pieces?"

And I've fortunately been working with engineers most of my life, and I just really have learned and I admired how they can take something that's really big and break it in and start to tackle that problem as long as you're anchored into what is the overall thing that we're trying to solve here.

Lenny Rachitsky Awesome. Very helpful. People always hear these terms, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm a great systems thinker." And so it's always helpful to just hear from different people what that actually means.

Adam Ward I think systems thinking sounds very strategic, but actually I think it's extremely tactical. The very best systems thinkers take these things and put them into very small tactics and tactic by tactic, kind of remove the blocker.

Lenny Rachitsky So to close the thread on this step of finding these incredible people, what I'm hearing is mostly it's sit around, talk to people and just jam in a doc probably of, "Here's people that people recommend. Here's companies to look at."

Adam Ward Yeah, and there are tools and there's LinkedIn, there's all these things too. But I think the most valuable one is the most time-intensive one, which is spending time and digging into people's networks. We've shared this before, but people on my team whose entire job is to dig into our current employees networks. You could automate that.

You could use an AI tool and walk them through a facilitation of it, but nothing beats you and I sitting down every other week for six weeks and diving into people. You're like, "Hey, last session you gave me these three names. I tracked down and then... But what about this person?" You're like, "Oh yeah, they were great too." I'm like, "Oh, what was good?" So you go back to back. "By the way, I'm also holding you accountable for you sending out notes. And what did they say?

" "Oh, they didn't reply. You're going to send another note?"

And so kind of this one-to-one, hand-to-hand cultivating of signal I think is really important. Of course, those signals go into a system and a database, but the extraction I think is a hugely personal and effective approach.

Lenny Rachitsky This all sounds very time-intensive and slow and lots of work. There's a reason companies don't hire this way, treat everyone as an exec because they're not execs. They're IC engineers, PMs. How do you talk about that trade-off of taking this approach knowing that it's going to take a lot more time and effort?

Adam Ward Yeah. I mean, I usually will ask a question, "So founder, in all the things are important to you, where does talent fall into that list?" And like, "Ah, it's number one. Talent is the most important thing." So if talent is the number one thing, it's not about time or this is where the focus should be.

And so if talent is number one, then there should be no obstacles in terms of effort or resourcing or time put in to get there because that is paramount to your success. You just said that objectively. And so if both can't be true, you can't say, "Hey, it's the most important thing and I'm going to outsource it," or, "I'm going to hand it over to a recruiting organization to do." If it's the number one thing, that is your focus.

Lenny Rachitsky Hearing that, obviously correct. Why would you not do that? And then there's like, "Holy shit, everything's on fire all the time. I have to make time for all this stuff, all these meetings." And it's just like, is there anything you do to help keep a founder and a team on track and just sticking to this plan knowing it's so much work and time?

Adam Ward Yeah. I mean, typically the founder's keeping the company on track around that, the very best companies. And part of it, keeping on track means keeping top of mind. There's also the adage of what gets measured gets done. So if it's an important thing, we measure it just like we might measure uptime or we might measure customer satisfaction or we might measure revenue and we hold those teams accountable. We also hold hiring managers and leaders and organizations accountable to

hiring.

And so keeping it top of mind, but putting in the right systems around rewards and recognition and all those things around it will help people keep it as a priority. But if you aren't measuring it, they will hand that over. They will shirk that responsibility to somewhere else.

Lenny Rachitsky Yeah. One of your big pet peeves is having the recruiters... not basically empowering the recruiters and hiring managers not being deeply involved in the process.

Adam Ward Yeah. I think a lot of companies, recruiting owns the hiring goal. And I've yet to be in a company where recruiters are making hiring decisions. So these things are in conflict. Hiring managers or leaders or committees are making hiring decisions. And I feel like the recruiter's goal is really about helping provide confidence to that hiring manager to make the right decision. They're a confidence engine.

They're not a decision-making engine. And so I see a lot of companies where they lose the thread is when they essentially hand over the function of recruiting, the act of recruiting to a function of recruiting. And so no one should care more about a hire. No one gets the joy or the pain of a good and bad hire than that hiring manager and that team.

So why then is a recruiter or recruiting organization holding that accountability when they don't have the decision-making, let alone the benefits or pain or cost of a good or bad hire?

Lenny Rachitsky I want to come back to this. It's like a different funnel, but I'll call it a funnel. Would you still describe it as a funnel, but the funnel of non-doom? Is there another term? Because it's still a funnel.

Adam Ward Yeah. Not all funnels are bad, so yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Funnel of talent density.

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky So coming back to the how to discover the best people. Luckily, there's this incredible post out there about how Cursor approaches hiring by Brie Wolfson that was very helpful in helping me prep for this talk. And another tactic that she shared of how Cursor finds the best people is there's a Slack channel called Hiring Ideas. And people on the team just share, "Here's someone we might want to hire."

Adam Ward It's super active. We could pull it up right now.

Lenny Rachitsky Let's check it out. Let's see if people are recommending.

Adam Ward Yeah, maybe we can get some audience input on it. So the general gist is someone will come across something impressive, a product, a post, overheard at a barbecue, and they'll drop that person's profile or that X post in hiring channel and it becomes a rallying effect around, "Ooh, I've heard of them. Here's what I think is compelling to them."

You almost create this quick strategy of how we might engage this person. And imagine working at a place where the company just is wired that way, where people are excited and enthusiastic and love the thrill, the hunt, and to go want to work with great people. And so we're just very fortunate to have that as a ongoing tailwind. But that was an early expectation, if you will.

An early, almost like, how do I say? It's almost like social credibility in the company to be able to surface someone here is great, and then people come in and help out and try to get them into the process. So as recruiting, that's such a... Like, "We are not initiating that. We're not dropping in a profile. Does anyone know this person? This is non-recruiting folks in the company dropping in ideas and then the company rallying behind it."

Lenny Rachitsky Amazing. So this is just a really good way to just, if we zoom out again, the way most companies hire, there's this funnel people apply, people refer, and they work through. And you try to reach out and work through and pick a few people at the bottom. And your point there is this is not the top people because they're not going to reply to you, they're not going to make it through the funnel. You don't even know what you're hiring for a lot of times.

Adam Ward Right. Correct, correct. And by the way, all the hiring ideas aren't always great ideas. They aren't always right for us, but it becomes this almost tangential injection into the hiring process that is often a great outcome.

Lenny Rachitsky And so just to maybe make very clear how different this approach is, basically it's the opposite. It's figure out who are the best top 50 people for this role in the world and then relentlessly pursue them.

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky So let's talk about that part of it, how to actually relentlessly pursue people. What are some tactics and stories there of just how you convince these top people to actually talk to you and then join?

Adam Ward Yeah. And I think one of the things you said a few minutes ago is around, "Hey, this can be a very slow process." And if you're at a zero point, you're at day zero, it can feel like a slow burn. But imagine over multiple days, you're actually planting all of these seeds with potential top 50 people. They're going to come to harvest at different rates, but you got to plant the seeds. You got to start.

And because it will take weeks for some, months for others. I have stories of years of we've worked on candidates, but you have to start the clock on that. And so how we think about this relentless pursuit is you'll often reach... one step is just getting them into a conversation, getting a response, getting some kind of engagement. But most people will tell you, if you get them, it's like, "Not good timing.

Here's all the reasons I can't do it." And you're like, "Hey, I'm not asking you to interview. I'm not asking you to consider a role. I'm asking for our next conversation." And so when you say, "Hey, it's not really good timing for me right now, maybe in the late fall." You're like, "Hey, I totally respect that's great. But also, you want to come by for a coffee and see the office?Can I introduce you to this other person on the team who's really fascinated by your work?

Can you go chat?"

And so you know it's not... Let's say it's true, they can't join till late fall. That doesn't mean you're not connecting them and having conversations on a weekly basis and working that piece. And it can only move it forward by doing nothing and actually talking to them in the late fall. At best you get them, even if they're still interested then or someone else hasn't grabbed them. So we think about this continual touchpoint approach to them, to getting them into process.

But that could... Again, we're willing to do that over days, weeks, months, and sometimes years.

Lenny Rachitsky When you reach out to someone, imagine working at Cursor now as part of SpaceX, it's like, "Oh, this is interesting and cool." And it's like, "Well, you never know, maybe it'll work out someday." A lot of companies... And you've worked with other companies that are not as interesting of a brand and as successful. Is there any advice for folks to get someone over the line to even talk that works? I imagine it's all very particular and nuanced, but just any advice there.

Adam Ward Yeah, I think it's really spending a lot of time upfront to get a sense of what could be engaging for them. So who might that be and what might that topic be? And so there are a number of excellent people in the world who aren't on any platform. There's no information about them. But most, you can get a couple nuggets. We spend a lot of time here thinking about who can create a warm intro to that person.

Almost as much effort goes into that than it does the actual messaging. Because if you get the right person, that accelerates it. And once someone's ignored one thing, it's much easier for them to ignore the second and third. But if you get the first one right, you've condensed that activation timeline and effort.

Lenny Rachitsky I've heard that you often say caring is free.

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Talk about that because it feels like that connects throughout this entire process.

Adam Ward Yeah, I think there's all kind of tactics out there that are of varying degrees of cost, but out-caring other companies, when I've built recruiting teams, that's something that we've always talked about. We can care more about that candidate than anyone else. That's in us, that's within us. We can do that. And I think over the history of time, when you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is, "The company generally wanted me.

They made it feel like I belong there." And so the more that we can care for our candidates and demonstrate that, I think is an unfair advantage and it's in all of us. And so that is an effort and that is a extra step type of thing. It's the extra intentionality that you take that I think in a very somewhat feeling like transactional business, like recruiting, if you're doing this step-by-step funnel of doom, you get caught up in the steps. You get caught up in the numbers ga

me.

"I need to reach out to a hundred to get to 20. I need to have 10 hire manager screens to get four onsite." You get caught up in the numbers and you lose the human element. You're looking for the one. It's like I tried to remind my team, "We're trying to hire one person for this role here, not 10. So don't get caught up in the 10, focus on the one."

Lenny Rachitsky That is such a big reframe in this way of thinking. As you said, instead of this funnel of we need 200 people at the top to get one at the bottom, you're just like, "Here's the 50 people that would be the best 50 in the world for this. We just need one of these 50." It feels a lot more doable.

Adam Ward And hopefully we're building relationships with dozens of other of those that could be... So when you talk about this being slow, we're planting seeds, planting seeds, we're planting seeds. And I think the other thing that often happens when you get into this funnel of doom mentality is I think you become overly consistent in your hiring approach. And we are very comfortable with bespoke and ad hoc hiring. That doesn't mean we don't have similar stages for...

But who that next conversation is, what they might focus on, I think we get a little robotic sometimes in recruiting with that. So a lot of companies, as they get into higher volume hiring, they might like, "Hey, we have a pool of these interviewers who can do this type of interview." And they just let fate decide. They let availability decide who has that next conversation. But the savvy recruiter or the savvy hiring manager is like, "Ooh, they mentioned this thing.

Who on our team has that shared interest in that pool? Can we be a little bit more prescriptive? And can we orchestrate a much better candidate experience by taking the extra thoughtful step of who might have a better conversation together?"

Lenny Rachitsky It's so interesting hearing just how important that initial contact is for the rest of the process and how much of this is for future seed planting versus even immediately.

Adam Ward Yeah, I feel like we put so much energy to the onsite interview, which I totally get. But honestly, the most important one is that hiring manager first conversation. And so it feels like this 50/50 like, "Hey, half the people you talk to hiring manager should come out." And I think we underestimate the importance of it because this is who you're going to work with. This person's going to make the hiring decisions. And so they should be asking the most important questions. The

y should be pulling out the most important motivators from that candidate.

And I feel like we sometimes maybe, we put it into a 30-minute thing often. It's 30 minutes, and it feels so important to the rest of that process.

Lenny Rachitsky Especially if instead of, we just need this funnel and work through a bunch of people. This is one of the 50 in the world that could be the best for this.

Adam Ward You might meet three times. You might meet four times as a hiring manager before that person actually is fully in process.

Lenny Rachitsky The way Brie described this in her piece is that you treat hiring as... the atomic unit of hiring as the person, not the job spec and not the role.

Adam Ward Correct. And I think that makes it incredibly frustrating, imagine for my team, because you're like, "Oh, what's the..." And you're like, "Well..." It's almost like a decision tree. It could go many different ways based off of this conversation. But when you are not caught into the numbers game, it feels a little bit less scary when you're really focused on how do we get that person here versus are they the right person for that job?

Lenny Rachitsky And because they're on this list, they're innately very popular and in demand. Is there anything else that works for getting them excited to talk and interested other than soft, the warm intro, things you've shared?

Adam Ward Yeah. I mean, we've done lots of tactics, I think, to get them involved. I mean, one thing I just love is breaking bread. Having a meal with someone is one of the most human and leveling things that you can do. Sharing a meal across the table is just a disarming act and a joining act that I think is just so important. So that could be a coffee, it could be a lunch.

It doesn't need to be super formal, but I just think it is a humanizing activity that I think is really important. So we try to center around food and drink as much as possible. I think we've done other things I think are very useful, which is if they are one of these 50 people, they might be somewhat famous or well-respected. They probably have an expertise. Having them come in and give a talk to the team, having them come in and do a fun side project.

These people, they love to share and learn and they're curious. But also it demonstrates increased interactivity between the two teams around quality and gives them this realistic preview of being there. We try to play home games as much as we can, bringing them into the office. But we also understand some of the folks early on might want to go to a neutral site of a coffee shop or something too. But we try to play home games when we can because you have the power of the team

.

You have the power... And so, one analogy I think about is sometimes when some people are considering university early in their lives, you walk onto a campus and you get that feel in your gut. And you can't really describe, but it's just like, "Ooh, this feels like home." We want people to feel that when they walk into the offices of Cursor and that is a priceless moment. And by the way, it can be a defining... It also could not hit.

And it's good to suss that out early too. But for a lot of people, it does hit and we like that moment.

Lenny Rachitsky This resonates so deeply with early days Airbnb. I remember Joe Gebbia had the saying, "Just get them in the elevator." And this is because the office was on the second floor of this building. You had to go in this elevator to get in. And that was the whole strategy, "Just get them in the elevator."

Adam Ward Yeah. That was more than half the battle.

Lenny Rachitsky Along these lines of breaking bread in home court, I know this might be one of the reasons you guys have a Cafe Cursor right there near the office, and now it's happening all over the world. I think Ben leads this work-

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky ... but there's all these cafes popping up all over the world.

Adam Ward Yeah, I think it's been an interesting... Obviously, it's very much focused on the product and the user, but he and that team have done a really good job of taking that vibe and putting into a moment. And if you've been in the Cursor offices, it almost feels like you're in a Hogwarts Library. It's very warm and soft, but cafes bring that energy as well.

And so we've tried to lift that and drop that in really around the world.

Lenny Rachitsky And there's also a lot of chalkboards at the office.

Adam Ward A lot of chalkboards. It's, again, this disarming, warm feel that I think really exudes our Midwest vibes. That is sometimes how I describe Cursor. Very hardworking, very ambitious, but at the same time, the work speaks for itself and understated as well. And so I think a lot of our office helps evoke those vibes too.

Lenny Rachitsky This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking, loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs, and now with Command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once though about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team.

Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyzing my cash flows. And just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year.

I just asked, "How much have I made from X over the past year?

" 10 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a FinTech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA Members FDIC. Okay, so if people have been following along, we're working our way through the funnel. This is my strategy here. So we've talked about how to figure out what you're looking for, figure out who these people are, how

to get them talking to you.

Lenny Rachitsky Say you got them in the interview stage. What are some things you've learned about how to increase your signal on the person and identify if they're a good fit and someone you want to make an offer to?

Adam Ward Yeah, some of it's a little fundamental, which is research has shown that work samples are the highest predictor of success at a company, but yet most companies are still spending a lot of time doing one-to-one across the table assessments. And so I think we are famously known for doing long onsite experiences for some of our roles where they do a project and they get work to side by side.

So that gives us a very strong signal. It also gives them the candidate tremendous signal. And so I think this is where most companies get it wrong on the onsite. They're almost always buying. ... On the onsite, they're almost always buying. This is like we are assessing, we're extracting information. We're not giving much back to the candidate. And I'm a big fan of the power of self-selection. And really good self-selection serves really good inputs and data.

And so we want that experience with a candidate to feel more two-way than most. So we really think about crafting that onsite experience through who they might meet. We talked about that. We really clear handpicking who they might meet for those interviews. We do a lot of work sample and project type of work to give us good signal, but we also really curate who's greeting them, who's sitting beside them for lunch. We always try to put it around a meal, a dinner or lunch or a

breakfast.

And everything is really curated to make that as high quality experience for them and get them the data, but also us getting data from people that we feel like are most going to connect with that person.

Lenny Rachitsky Who runs point on this sort of experience? Is it a recruiter or is it the hiring manager?

Adam Ward I would say I think it's the recruiter primarily as the quarterback, but they're pulling lots of levers. And so the hiring manager is probably going to have the most insight into some of those people. Our recruiting coordinators are tremendous and I think we probably, and they do a lot of this hosting with us as well. And so our recruiting course of course do some scheduling, but they're probably doing more of this candidate shepherding.

So imagine a candidate who's with us for a day or two. There's lots of moving pieces and helping them move from a workstation where they might be doing a project into lunch back to that, helping them get their environment set up. So there's a lot of people in play. We ask our recruiter to be the quarterback, but a lot of the insight is coming from hiring managers and execution with the coordinator too.

Lenny Rachitsky It's interesting just how much of the experience and process changes with this worldview of every person we are talking to is very special and they're very rare and these are the best for this role. And so it's clear how much of it trickles down into thinking deeply about every touchpoint along the journey versus the typical journey.

Adam Ward And imagine that you have teams and employee base who understand that well, they went through it. So you get over this tipping point moment with a company where they had that experience. So they recognize, acknowledge it. Now they're part of how fun is that? They had a great experience. Now they get to help deliver that for this next batch of people.

Lenny Rachitsky It's recursive.

Adam Ward So you kind of create this flywheel opportunity once you get over that initial hump.

Lenny Rachitsky I just remembered actually, I had a friend applying for a job at Cursor and he said it was the best candidate experience he's ever had. Just remember that.

Adam Ward So by definition, we though about doing a lot of scoping of really great people. Not all of them are going to be a fit for us by their choice or ours, but every one of them can walk away as a net promoter. And again, by definition, they're some of the best. Those promoters weigh more and count more than others because they're influential, they're great, they're known to be good.

And so they may never come back to us, but they might tell you who now tells this audience or they might tell you who then you mentioned something at a barbecue and now it becomes this ground swell and you start to build a little stronger magnet. And that activation becomes a little bit less hard if you do that well.

Lenny Rachitsky Absolutely. The work trial piece, I saw an interview with Michael Terrell talking about this, and he said how they tried to get rid of it because it obviously adds a lot of load and some people don't want to be doing these things. And he said that it just totally tanked their signal and they had to bring it back.

Adam Ward Yeah, it's a huge commitment you can imagine of time. But if talent is your number one thing, then that is a good investment of time to do it. We all have a role to play in recruiting at the company. Not everyone is carved out or best to do trial work, but some are. But some can do the lunch, some could do the greet. So there's lots of different ways that people can play a role.

But yeah, when we ran that experiment, because it is quite expensive, it is also a big ask of candidates. We really struggled to have confidence in our decision. Again, this is a confidence building function, and so we are excited to bring it back.

Lenny Rachitsky So a good learning there is it's like if you are not doing this, you are lacking significant signal.

Adam Ward Possibly. Yeah, I think so. And I don't think there's a lot of maxims or absolutes in this business, but I think for a lot of companies, it's hard to think of a better way than doing side-by-side real work to get those signals.

Obviously some of it in this case is a technical signal, but imagine the amount of core values and collaboration and other signals you get over a stretch of time that could be arguably more important than the specific technical skill.

Lenny Rachitsky What do you do for PMs or, I don't know, go-to-market or ops people? Is there something like that?

Adam Ward We have a version of this across. And so the go-to-market team does a challenge where they work through a challenge together, a challenging customer, things like that. And that's often one-to-one with a hiring manager. Product does a similar project type together as well. So we have versions of that that I feel like are titrated to the function, but also the role and things like that as well. So we try not to be uniform across this because these functions are very different.

Lenny Rachitsky One of the classic criticisms with the work trial is you're doing work for the company and it's like, "Oh, we're just solving problems for you for free." What's the philosophy on the problem they tackle, say engineering or PM?

Adam Ward Yeah, there's a set of problems they can choose from. And so they feel like they have some direction and discretion. We also are very open to right sizing it for them based on where they are and their availability and time too, up to a certain extent. So we try to be flexible and understanding around that. And we also will sometimes use Saturdays too. So we understand it can be hard to take time away on a work week or a traditional work week.

And so we totally get it. It's a big ask, a big commitment. We think it's worth it, but we're also willing to schedule that when that works for them. So there's this conflict around a lot of time and effort that could feel slow, but when they're ready to go, we are fast. We make up that time. So if you and I were having an initial screen, you're like, "Yeah, okay, I'll be open to talking to hiring manager." Open up your calendar. I have their calendar. Great.

You're going to talk to them in an hour. So once they're ready to go, you got to capitalize on that. You can't create openings for them to have second guessing. So when we go, we go, but it might take a lot of time to get up to that moment.

Lenny Rachitsky Moving ourselves further down the funnel, what's the moment when you decide we're going to make this person an offer? Is there something that you look for specifically and/or just what's the process like a hiring committee meeting is something else?

Adam Ward Yeah, we debrief as immediately as possible as a team. Each function has a little bit of a different hiring process of what that looks like, but we don't have hiring committees. It is hiring manager led. They get lots of input from the team. And remember the role of the hiring manager is, it's not a democracy.

Hiring manager is holding that group accountable for helping them get them the right inputs to make out the right decision, to make the best decision, hire or no hire. And so we try to frame it in that way, making sure we get really good signal on it. So we try to move really quickly. So debriefing's typically same day, if not next day. And they make that decision, then that decision goes to the founders for stamping.

Lenny Rachitsky Awesome. Okay. Then you get to the offer stage. There's a bunch of stuff here, but one is just there are many massive offers happening these days. Okay, so say you made an offer to one of these top 50 people and they're like, "Okay, but I also got this offer from Anthropic for a bazillion dollars." How do you handle that? And also just, is that super frustrating or is it like, "Oh wow, more signal, this person is incredible."

Adam Ward Yeah, I think it can be both. There's room for both. I think that the goal is to not be selling at the close. We're trying to sell throughout. And so if you think about the craft of recruiting, the craft of recruiting is upfront getting a really clear on this person's motivations and why they might make a move and for what.

And then making sure that that entire experience hits to those pieces. So at the end is a culmination, not a start. It feels almost like a natural outcome of it where just like, "Oh, this is almost like this assumptive next step of, yeah, and here's the offer that we talked about all along." Versus starting the clock or starting the conversation on a close. I think we try to get back to those motivations.

So we might think about how we would differentiate against Anthropic size wise or the role or the team or the people you work with. We really try to focus on the intrinsic things, not the extrinsic things, which is very hard to do when you're getting MBA players offers and salaries and sometimes bigger than that. But we really try to focus on people who want to be here.

And often when people are thinking about their job search and what might be next, they maybe start with a set of things and we maybe help them discover other things along the way. And we might discover at the end that actually, this is not the right fit and that's okay. And we feel good about walking away from that. But often it's around helping them discover that actually maybe this is the right place through that journey.

Lenny Rachitsky How often do people take a job that doesn't have the highest comp? Is that common or is that rare?

Adam Ward Yeah, I think you're trying to mitigate comp as a reason people come or don't come. And often that means it's not the highest number. And I think we've all probably talked with people who maybe at some point in their career chase just the largest number. And I think what you realize six months in is that just becomes your new level of comp life, but you're not excited by the people you work with or the work you're doing.

And so we try to mitigate that as a piece, but I think it happens a lot. And also rightfully so, we've probably lost people where maybe we were the highest one and they went somewhere else too. And if that's the right fit for them, this is going to sound a little polyannic, but I fundamentally believe there are right people for right companies at the right time. And if they discover at the end of that that we're not, that's the right call for them. And as a recruiter, if they

're not the right fit, I literally have to redo that work in six months.

I don't want to redo that work. I'd rather let's figure that out right now and have that more open conversation.

Lenny Rachitsky You should build an agent that helps you decide and figure that out, which company is the right fit for me right now in this time because that sounds really valuable to check that price.

Adam Ward That'd be super interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky Something that I've heard Anthropic does that I've never heard anyone do, similar to Tesla, they don't let you negotiate. They're just like, "Here's the offer." Do you feel like that's an only Anthropic thing that they could do because they're just Anthropic? Or is that something you think about?

Adam Ward I mean, I've thought about it. I see over time different companies have done that. And I think what I respect about it is you make that call and you kind of stick with it and there's a commitment to it. But every company's different and I think the approach is... So I respect it. I think about it, but it may not be right for us.

Lenny Rachitsky From the candidate's perspective, what are some mistakes that people make when they get an offer that shoot themselves in the foot?

Adam Ward Generally, the advice I give to candidates is when you think about your offer and if you're negotiating, it has to just fit a line of logic. And so if you are asking for a certain piece of compensation or a certain other piece of it, is it rooted? Walk me through the logic behind it.

I think that makes it easy for the person to understand, but also easy for them to communicate that forward to maybe a different decision maker as well. So I see candidates who are maybe a little bit all over the place on that, where early on it's this and now it's this and it's kind of the add-on type of thing versus a candid who's coming in of here's the four things that are important to me and being clear and consistent with it as much from the outset as you can. Not all t

hings can be there at the outset.

That makes it very logical and easy for the company to engage with that.

Lenny Rachitsky Versus just finding random excuses for more comp.

Adam Ward Correct. And I think what a company generally knows is we're intrinsically not their top choice. And so we're trying to win head and hearts here and we're not trying to buy that out.

Lenny Rachitsky How just mind-blowing are these comps these days? I imagine you've seen so many.

Adam Ward Yeah, I think it's all true and worse or higher. I think the open question, a lot of us AI companies are like, "How does it go from here? How does this end?" Nobody knows. But it does feel like the unit of measure that matters the most is the most fixed and finite, which is time. It is a race against the clock to get the model, the talent.

And that is the thing that matters the most is the most precious. Clearly for some companies, there's more money and there's more other things, but time is the most fixed and important asset right here in this market.

Lenny Rachitsky Just coming back to the AI researcher trend, it's crazy how these people used to be just off on the side building these AI models, ML models, not that exciting to anybody, and now they're the most in demand.

Adam Ward And I remember I helped build out the research group at Facebook before... they'd just not hire PhDs, even advanced degrees really much at all. And this is 2010 or something.

And I remember meeting just this set of academics really who were getting this growing frustration of their work, not ever making it outside of the halls of academia. And so I'm very excited for that population to have this moment.

They've been arguably the underpinning of technical innovation for decades and they're having their moment and well-deserved.

Lenny Rachitsky Kind of along those lines to close out the funnel of, let's call it the funnel of joy instead of the funnel of doom.

Adam Ward Yeah, love it.

Lenny Rachitsky I heard from one of your candidates, here's the quote that I got, that you and your team's ability to close and convert candidates with offers to accept is extraordinary. What are some things you do that help get someone over the line that are kind of on the fence?

Adam Ward Yeah. So I think there's a couple things there. One, I'll just re-mention quickly, which is that the closing is happening throughout the process in terms of who they're meeting and motivations and removing objections along the way. So that's one. I think the second is closing is a team sport.

And so when we have a candidate, particularly a high profile, high caliber, there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes. And that might be 10 minutes, but it's not the amount of time. It is a focused energy every day around what we are collectively doing. And so that could be the hiring manager recruiter, but also could be former peers.

There's lots of people who influence that, and we try to just be very intentional about making sure that person feels cared for and coming here and staying on top of things. The third thing I think is we just try to make it very personal. And so just this week, two days ago, I just saw, and we try to share these stories internally too, because this is how it builds the culture of recruiting. We kind of share these stories back to the company.

But someone was sharing, we were working on a candidate in New York and we learned that through getting to know them that they went to a performing arts high school and were a classically trained violinist and was just very into stringed instruments. So this person found this specialty store in New York City and bought this kind of unique Turkish guitar, almost violin guitar thing.

And they're meeting for a dinner where they got the offer and he presented that gift to them. And so it was a couple hundred dollars maybe. Not a lot of money, particularly relative to the size of offer and the size of impact that we thought that someone's going to have. But it's the thoughtfulness and the touch and the uniqueness of it and the personal moment of that that I think stands out.

And I think when a candidate thinks about having the best candidate experience, often they feel like, "Wow, this felt tailored to me. This felt unique to me."

Lenny Rachitsky I know there's also a Slack channel that gets created for each candidate. Can we discuss this for a second?

Adam Ward Every candidate. Yeah. So I think when you talk about the standup, sometimes that's also strategy and updates. And so there's the same rallying effect to activate is no different at that close. And each candidate has their own channel.

Lenny Rachitsky So much of this just keeps coming back to intentionality around every specific candidate and not treating it like the funnel, but just this is the atomic unit, this person, what can we do throughout the entire process to make them get excited and see if it's a fit?

Adam Ward Which is hard to do when you're doing at scale at the funnel of doom. So when you are thinking about a hundred candidates for every role, then that does not scale. But when you're narrowing that down to a small percentage of people that you've been laying groundwork with over time, because now people are moving faster through those steps and it's a smaller number of people. So the time that you're taking holistically for that funnel, you're just displacing and putting it in d

ifferent places.

Lenny Rachitsky It's so interesting. And it's such a different approach. I've never heard of anyone hiring this way.

Adam Ward Yeah. And we had this thesis when I was at Growth by Design around, we think there's this different way to do this. We'd seen all these companies over time and worked with labs and all these things. We're like, "Wow, these companies are literally at the cutting edge of a technical revolution here." Probably the most exciting one we've seen in millennia. And they are recruiting in a web browser way.

And we're like, "If a company had this willingness to commit this time and effort as this collective force, they could really have an unfair advantage when it comes to talent." And when you think about companies over time, whether they become this iconic logo or one that we no longer recognize, it often isn't the first company, the fastest to market, the first idea. It's actually execution. And execution comes down to having the right talent at the right time.

And when companies figure that out, they're like, "Ooh, this is the most important thing and this is how we're going to approach it." And so when we met Cursor, we're like, "This could be fun."

Lenny Rachitsky Cursor is actually such a great example of exactly what you're describing because it feels like throughout the entire history of Cursor, it was always just like, how are they going to survive? There's these model companies building these things, the IDs. People are moving away from IDs. And it's been incredible to watch Cursor execute and get ahead of each of these shifts whenever people doubt that there's an opportunity here and it just keeps growing and killing it.

Adam Ward I mean, it's not too long ago it was like tab auto complete on it. And now we're in a fully cloud agents. But just remember the time span is months. The condensed nature of this is just wild.

Lenny Rachitsky I came to the office at one point and I got a tab button and now it's just no longer even a thing.

Adam Ward Yeah, now it's just cute. Yeah, now it's just on the shelf. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Now just talk. Something that one of your colleagues wanted me to ask you is just what is it like to work with an exec team who truly believes recruiting is the most important thing?

Adam Ward It's a gift and at times incredibly frustrating. So the gift part of it is imagine that how much they care. Trying to convince a founder to go have a conversation or to do anything recruiting like, that is not a problem here. And we've all worked with companies where you're trying to pull them in to things. So it's a true gift.

The challenge is they're in your shit. They're in it. They understand it. The Cursor team hired their first 80 people, roughly 80 people on their own. They know how to do it. They know how hard it is, which is great, but also they love it and they're in it and they want to do it. And so there can be zero ego about this of who has what piece and it's an all hands on deck.

And so sometimes that can be confusing on whose doing things and things that you find out about things after the fact that happened. But I will take that every day. That is extremely net positive, but there's always a counterbalance to such an advantage like that.

Lenny Rachitsky So interesting. That's like CPOs often are frustrated for that reason where the founders are always in their shit deciding.

Adam Ward But they care. I'll take the effort and care with that tax any day.

Lenny Rachitsky I know one of your hot takes is that the recruiting team should be the highest paid team within the company.

Adam Ward And one of them. Yeah, if not. I mean, if you think about this- In one of them. Yeah, if not. I mean, if you think about this impact that they're having, and I feel like there's a supply and demand crisis around really strategic recruiters because of the somewhat transactional nature we've made recruiting over time. And so I just think there's a really small supply of recruiters who can function at this level and at this approach and style.

And so like any other labor market, it's a cost of labor thing and there's just very few of it. And so we think that they have tremendous impact, but it's a really rare skillset.

Lenny Rachitsky Something I wanted to ask you that I forgot to ask is, we talk a lot about talent and density. How much of it is about the person specifically versus the team that you assemble around them?

Adam Ward Yeah. I feel like where companies overly focus is an individual, and unless they are a team of one, it's actually, if you think about amazing leadership and amazing managers, they're actually quite great puzzle builders. And they think about building these teams that are complimentary together and then help them excel. And so talent density is not a single piece, unless the numerator and denominator are both one.

But that's not the case. Often this is one over how many people. And so talent density is actually a collective nature of individuals and humans. But we often, because you are recruiting one human at a time, I think sometimes we get overly focused on that specific 10Xer thing. And actually, I like to think a little bit more around exponential around 10X of a team versus an individual. I don't think you can have a 10X person on a bad team.

It just doesn't exist. I used to think when we were at my last company, we can't be a great service provider if we don't have a great client. There's just a bar there. And similarly, a person that might be excellent is going to be throttled if they're not on a strong and supportive team.

Lenny Rachitsky That makes sense to me. Okay. I'm going to ask you a bunch of random questions.

Adam Ward Okay.

Lenny Rachitsky Again, I think people are going to be hearing this and be like, "I need Adam immediately. We need help." And they're not going to be able to get that, because you've got a job. So I'm going to try to extract as much as I can while we're here. One is, say you're an early stage company thinking about hiring, setting up your hiring approach, what's the most common ways that early stage companies and founders f-up their early team in hiring?

Adam Ward Yeah. I think the thing they try to do is do this silver bullet hire, which is a first head of talent, and they collapse two competing skill sets into one. Okay. So generally, as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first recruiter, you're probably behind on hiring. There's a problem to solve there, you're behind on hiring. So maybe there's a debt of roles to fill, five, 10, 15.

But you also are hiring someone at this stage because you want them to build a system. They might be like, "Wow, I want to build something like Adam's talking about." So you're trying to build this, hire someone who can also put in the right pieces to help scale out. And those are competing interests, because a person wants to come in and like just any new hire, they want to prove out, they want to make hires, but they might not put in the system. Or they might put in the sys

tem, but not make any hires, and now you're not [inaudible 01:12:41].

And so they try to collapse this into one role, and generally that's a mistake. And so we recommend decoupling those things. So that means you still might hire one person, but can you get some help with the other one?

I'm going to hire the person who's going to put in the right system, but I'm going to partner them with a contingent recruiter or something else to make some short-term progress while they're in to teach the company how to do this through these roles that they feel that they're helping orchestrate, or vice versa, I might bring in someone to help us put in the right foundation, which we did at GBD. And then they could hire a really high-powered IC recruiter who can execute.

Lenny Rachitsky Amazing. That makes all the sense in the world. When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything else you think is important to look for? I know it depends on maybe which of these two buckets they're going to be in, but any other advice?

Adam Ward Yeah. I think number one is that they are curious and business focused. They're an early member of the team. They got to be really curious understanding of how the business works and how each of those hires is going to change the slope of the business. And so often that means that they have all these interesting... It shows up in lots of way, curious people. But I think that's the number one thing I think of.

The number two one, and I think these sometimes get switched, is just high motor. Someone who understands the grind that it will be and the pace that it works and is down for it. And that doesn't mean they have to be younger, or it doesn't mean anything. It's just that they love working at this edge of overwhelmedness.

And so I often think about my team as we want the water level to be right here, and so you're breathing. And if you've met any recruiters, recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity, and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they are useless, or if they're way overwhelmed, also just overwhelmed.

But they're great at this middle ground of edge of adrenaline rush busy, and you want to find those people.

Lenny Rachitsky Oh, man. So along those lines, I've heard from a bunch of people that you just have a huge followship on your team. There's a lot of heads of talent from other companies that decided to join your team to be ICs. What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term?

Adam Ward Yeah. One thing I learned is, at each place my team has looked different, because the company, how they think about recruiting or the product is different. And so the Cursor way demanded a different type of team. It demanded this level of recruiter and who understands the leadership recruiting motion, who's not going to get caught up in the numbers game of the funnel do. They have this confidence and they have a network that they can tap into.

And so I think we talked a lot about hiring managers, other people networks, but seasoned great recruiters have their own networks too. You have a couple of recruiters in your life that you trust that you probably would seek advice on, and so we try to collect those people too, because they can be as influential in tapping their networks as a technical leader, for example. Then I just think about three attributes of someone who I want on my team.

One, I want people who are excellent humans and excellent in what they do, and I'm not willing to trade that off. We are going to spend most of our waking hours during the week together, and we should all be selfish enough to want to work with great people, great humans. The second is, I look for people who have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove, love the craft.

They have this internal drive and motivation to be excellent. And that can show up in lots of ways and I try to get to that. And then the third thing is, I look for people who put team over themselves. And so this is really important clearly for the team I built now. They could be running recruiting lots of places. But what they've realized is that no one really aspires to get to middle management. We end up there.

But what they did realize is they love the craft of recruiting and they love to be challenged. They love to learn. They want to work with great people. And so when I would go out to my network and I'm like, "Hey Lenny, who are three people you know that are excellent humans and excellent recruiters, they just have this natural drive or chip on their shoulder, and they put team above themselves?" You're like, "Oh, you should talk to Janet." You can conjure those things up.

And so we've really tried to build a team of those folks here, and I'm really excited about the people we've collected.

Lenny Rachitsky It's a good sign when I'm just like, "Wait, I want to work for Adam. This sounds really great."

Adam Ward And I try to be this balance of... Because recruiting is sometimes around inspiring your team, but it's a deeply operational function. And so I've tried to find this balance of where I can be in the weeds, operational, understand it, be in it with them, but also sometimes lift out and help paint the bigger picture too.

Lenny Rachitsky Amazing. Adam, we've covered so much ground. We've gone through the whole funnel and more. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with any nugget you want to double down on?

Adam Ward I mean, one thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is happening I'm seeing more of is reneges on offers. And so I think a lot of companies get to the yes of the offer acceptance, and there's often a gap of time. And the more senior they are, often it's beyond a couple weeks. We think about a second motion happening after offer accept, which is we are a button seat business in recruiting.

And there's a big window there where someone has like, "Huh, they accept the offer," and we go on to the next one. But what are we doing between offer, accept, and join?

And there's two parts of that. One is, make sure they show up. The second is a bit of a pre-boarding and helping them have a fast ramp by staying connected with them. So we'll do dinners with other people who have accepted. We try to essentially create community around them. We'll send them a Cursor laptop, because it feels like a presumptive you've joined kind of way. We do these dinners, we do these touch points.

One is help to make sure that delivery happens, but also to feel like they start to get excited too. They start to visually realize what it's going to look like.

Lenny Rachitsky Wow. That is so brutal to have gone through the entire funnel. Got the offer, made the offer, accepted the offer.

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Oh, man. And you're saying this is a trend, I imagine, because just the market is so hot and they're getting better offers, offers that they didn't expect.

Adam Ward Correct.

Lenny Rachitsky Yeah. I feel like there's this lake of things we didn't talk about. Is there anything else? Any other trends? Any other trends, things that you noticed of, wow, this is changing in the hiring landscape?

Adam Ward I think maybe the other trend, I think we see the rise of the talent engineer. I don't know if you've seen that out there. The function within a recruiting team who is a possibly former engineer who's building tools and things like that. And my warm take, not a hot take, my warm take is every recruiter should be a talent engineer. The things that recruiters now have at their fingertips that they could build in Cursor or other tools is really phenomenal.

And in earlier companies I was in, we were often beholden to begging for engineering time to build us tools or functions or features. And now that's in us. We have that right now in our team. And so I want a future state of my recruiting team to feel like they are talent engineers versus leaning on someone else on the team to help them build a tool, if that makes sense.

Lenny Rachitsky Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. It's interesting. There's go-to-market engineers. Every function is going to have their version of engineer over time.

Adam Ward Yeah. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Engineers, engineers. Well, Adam, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Adam Ward Okay.

Lenny Rachitsky I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky All right. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Adam Ward Yeah, this is super nerdy. So there's two. There's one that I read in undergrad that has stuck with me, and it's Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman. And it's the rise of EQ as an important piece of it. And I just feel like emotional intelligence right now more than ever is so important in this AI age. And so it was super transforming to me way back then, and I think is really important now.

And the other one I love for founders is just the High Growth Handbook by Eli Gill. I'm a big fan of a book where you can just jump to a chapter and get an answer, and it's not this linear piece you got to work through. And so I think it's such a great reference guide on different problems. And for the most part, building companies, the components are the same. The core principles, even when that came out several years ago, I still think hold true, so I like the High Growth H

andbook.

Lenny Rachitsky A Stripe Press shout out, High Growth Handbook. I imagine you've read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson-

Adam Ward Yeah. Love her.

Lenny Rachitsky ... who feels really up your alley.

Adam Ward Yeah. Love her.

Lenny Rachitsky Yeah. Another Stripe Press.

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Amazing. I love that. Yeah, Eli's book is still useful. I don't know how many years later? Amazing.

Adam Ward Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

Adam Ward Yeah, I have not seen a movie in years. I feel like my life-

Lenny Rachitsky Because you are. This is [inaudible 01:22:38].

Adam Ward ... my life is at 20-minute chunks. But I have been watching a series, The Pit. And I'm from Western Pennsylvania, so from the Pittsburgh area. And not only is it extremely well done, but two, it makes my life feel less frantic. Living hour...

It's about the only thing that can make my life feel less frantic is living an hour in an ER and all they go through. And I often try to tell my team around the gravity of things. I was like, "Hey y'all, we get to work for this amazing company and product things, but people are not living and dying every day by decisions that we make." In The Pitt, they a. Re. So it just gives this leveling part.

And then third, I think they just capture the ethos of that region, which is my core, which is Western Pennsylvania, blue collar, grinder. And I just think they do a really good job of capturing that. So I've been watching that when I can on some airplanes.

Lenny Rachitsky I love that for most people that show is very stressful, and for you it's calming, because it's less stressful to your life.

Adam Ward Just the relative nature of things is helpful.

Lenny Rachitsky Have you watched The Bear? Because I feel like that'd be another example.

Adam Ward Yeah. I think if I was probably a Chicago guy, that would probably resonate. Although I have seen it. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky Oh, man. Okay. A few more questions. Your favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love other than Cursor?

Adam Ward Yeah, I think there's two. I think one is semi-recent and one is... I'm a huge Granola fan. I think I was super early on Granola, and I love that they continue to innovate and really just great product decisions, easy to use. They're great on feedback too. If you've ever given them feedback, they're phenomenal. The second I've been using a lot is Wispr Flow, and just trying to get out quick notes to my team.

I am better this than this on terms of my thoughts. And so Wispr has been amazing on the go to drop notes to my team.

Lenny Rachitsky Listen to this, Adam. You may not know this.

Adam Ward I don't.

Lenny Rachitsky Subscribers to my newsletter get a year free of not only Cursor, but also Granola and Wispr Flow.

Adam Ward I did not know that.

Lenny Rachitsky And 30 other incredible products, Replit and Google and Lovable, and it's out of control.

Adam Ward I love that.

Lenny Rachitsky So if you like any of these products, ladiesproductbest.com.

Adam Ward That was not a place at all. Yeah, I did not know that.

Lenny Rachitsky It's just we have all the best products for free for a freaking year, including Cursor. So there you go, ladiesproductbest.com. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

Adam Ward Yeah, I think there's three things that I come back to and I try to instill in my kids too. One is, work hard. I think the value of hard work is hard to understate and something I grew up in. Second is, do great work. So let's not confuse the two. And third is, be helpful.

And I think one thing I've really tried to do, and maybe part of the reason I was able to help build this team is I've really just tried to be helpful. And if you talk to founders out there, anyone, I will answer their emails. I will jump on a 10-minute call with them. And I want to think that people come to me for help and advice, and it's the right ones. I'm now getting to reap some of that of people who want to come to the work on the team.

So those three things I really try to live by.

Lenny Rachitsky That is an awesome set of principles to live by. Clearly it has contributed to your success. I'm going to steal them all. Those are really good. That's a good tripod of things to be focused on. You talked about being a dad. Final question; People said you're an expert on the importance of a well-placed dad joke. I'm not going to ask you to do a joke unless you want to, but more so, just what's something you've learned about raising kids?

Because I'm a dad of a three-year-old. What's just a thing you've learned about raising great kids?

Adam Ward It's humbling. They will challenge you in ways you don't expect. They are many mirrors of you sometimes. So it's a feedback mechanism. And it's such a joy, honestly. And I'm very lucky to have an amazing wife and partner who most times takes the unfair load of it.

But yeah, it's definitely my greatest joy.

Lenny Rachitsky That's such a good summary. That's exactly how it feels. Very challenging at times, but the greatest joy.

Adam Ward But just think about your career though, when you look back on your career of your most enjoyable times, you were a little bit over your skis. You were thrown into something unexpected that you weren't ready for, and you figured it out. And in the moment, it was a series of ups and downs, stacking S-curves. But you'll look back and I'll be like, wow, that was one of my career highlights, but you are really over your skis.

Lenny Rachitsky Molly Graham, who's been on the podcast and done a couple newsletter guest posts, she has this concept she calls the J-curve, which is your best roles are just you join and then you go way down and suck at it for a while, and then you come back up and that's the best experience you've ever had.

Adam Ward Yeah, Molly has gold out there, for sure.

Lenny Rachitsky She's so incredible. Working on a new guest post right now might've come out by the time this comes out.

Adam Ward Love it.

Lenny Rachitsky With that, two valid questions. Adam, what do you want to plug? Anything you want to point people to? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Adam Ward I think they're one and the same. I mean, I would love people to try Cursor. I think it's incredibly exciting things that we're coming out with, and we're really proud of it. Some things in the pipeline too. I'm not super out there online. I think I'm on LinkedIn a little bit, but I really honestly try to let my work and our team speak for what we do. But I'm always down to be helpful back to the last point.

So I really do get pure energy and joy from helping people. And so I know at some point that will come back in some way or form. Don't expect it to, but that's just where I get that drive for me.

Lenny Rachitsky Just to plug Cursor a little bit, not only is just the design and experience of Cursor awesome, the best feature for a lot of people is you could just switch between models extremely easily. So instead of getting hooked on Codex or Claude Code, you use Cursor and then a new Opus comes out, a new GPT comes out and you could switch and just play around with it immediately versus switching the product.

Adam Ward Yeah. There was a world where models were coming out every three or four months. We're down to a number of days between models. And people I know who love to build products want to be working with the best tools at any given time. And so our agent allows you to choose the right model. And I think for a lot of companies also cost is a rightful consideration now.

And so it really comes around optimization of using the right model for the right task, and so that's just landing it to Cursor's sweet spot.

Lenny Rachitsky Yeah. And you guys are also now just building state-of-the-art models built sitting on SpaceX's data centers.

Adam Ward Yeah, it's amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky A whole new world for Cursor, holy moly.

Adam Ward Yeah. Getting to train on the world's largest data center has just unlocked our model, so it's been amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky What a time to be alive.

Adam Ward Yeah, it's good.

Lenny Rachitsky Adam, thank you so much for being here.

Adam Ward Thanks for having me.

Lenny Rachitsky Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.