How to scale smarter when every hire can deliver 10x output

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The math of startup growth just changed. With AI tools, coding assistants, and website-building agents in every founder's toolkit, a single hire can now deliver 10x the output they could just two years ago. But when productivity scales this dramatically, how do you actually build for the long term?

Two founders who've cracked this code sat down to compare notes—and the conversation reveals some surprising strategies. Michael Truell leads Anysphere, the team behind Cursor, one of the fastest-growing companies in software history. In just two years, Cursor went from zero to $500M ARR, powering engineering teams at companies like the New York Times.

Parker Conrad built Rippling from a Y Combinator startup in 2017 to a multibillion-dollar platform that now powers today's hottest AI companies—including Cursor, Harvey, and Clay.

For the first time, they're opening their hiring playbooks and sharing the hard-won lessons from hypergrowth.

After learning this lesson, Nicolas developed a framework for when to bet on domain expertise versus proven skills — and created his own playbook for setting unconventional hires up for success. This helped him transform accountants into product leaders and customer success champions.