When hiring, I look for evidence of exceptional ability, or at least exceptional aspiration.
Sometimes these things get messed up in recruiting. I sometimes wonder, “If Nikola Tesla applied to Tesla, would we even give him an interview?” It’s not clear. They might say, “This guy came from some weird college in Eastern Europe, he’s got some odd mannerisms, we don’t know if we should give him an interview.” I worry that’s what we’d do. Our response should be, “Man, Nikola Tesla, this kid’s super smart. What does he want? We’ll pay him anything!”263
I always ask my teams to give a lot of thought to who should join. I recommend paying close attention to people who haven’t completed their grad or even undergrad, but are obviously brilliant. Better to have them join before they achieve a breakthrough.264
You’ve got to be willing to recruit hard for excellent people. When I was interviewing Bülent Altan for SpaceX, I told him, “I heard you don’t want to move to Los Angeles because your wife works for Google in San Francisco. Well, I just talked to Larry Page, and they’re going to transfer your wife down to LA. So what are you going to do now?” He said he would come work for SpaceX.265
I have a great ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not. And I am good at optimizing the efficiency of an engineering team. It helps that I’m quite good at engineering in general.266
In interviews, I ask people to tell me the story of their career and some of the tougher problems they dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points. Usually that’s enough for me to get a good gut feeling about someone. What I’m really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. Did they face difficult problems and overcome them?
Usually the person who had to struggle with the problem really understands it and they don’t forget if it was difficult. Ask them detailed questions about it, and they’ll know the answers. A person who was not responsible for that accomplishment will not know the details.267