The highest-leverage thing I’ve done as a founding engineer at Serval is focus on talent.  I realized early on that if I wanted to double my impact, working twice as much was impossible (not enough hours in the day) and becoming twice as good of an engineer was really really hard. But if I could help bring in five great engineers, I’d multiply what we could build and in a much more scalable way. Especially if I then helped those five great engineers bring in their own great networks! We’ve grown from about 20 people to 160 in this last year, and more than 40% of our hires came through referrals. In engineering, that number is even higher. The traditional playbook says build a huge top of funnel through agencies, then filter down stage by stage. But that's not what the greatest organizations in the world with the absolute highest bars for talent do. The 49ers won't hold open tryouts to find their starting quarterback. They'll identify the best free agents in the market and go focus on winning them over. We do the same. Referrals give us the strongest signal we can get. The best interview loop gives us maybe eight hours with a candidate. A referrer has often worked alongside that person for years. We offer huge referral bonuses and we then work to empower our employees to earn them. We've built internal tools like Spot, which analyzes everyone's network against every job description we have open to make suggestions to our employees on who to reach out to. We have fun tools like Orbits which maps each person's referral network like a social system, helps visualize your dynasty, and doubles as a leaderboard. We also host events where employees can bring their networks to get to know the team at Serval over a fully covered game of poker or a cold plunge. Thanks to Netta Jenkins and Inc. Magazine for telling the story: lnkd.in/g3aVeVKg We’re still hiring. If you’re an exceptional engineer (or an exceptional anything), my DMs are open!