In the fight for elite AI talent, the salary is the easy part.
At Cursor, the $60 billion company behind a suite of popular coding tools recently acquired by SpaceX, hiring a candidate is a bit like trying to win over someone who’s completely out of your league.
“Closing is a team sport,” Matt Ward, Cursor’s head of talent, said on a recent episode of the “People by WTF” podcast. For some high-profile candidates, he said, “there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we’re doing to get them to yes.”
The company has also created private Slack channels dedicated to individual recruits, giving employees a place to coordinate outreach, dinners, meetings, and other parts of the courtship.
In the AI universe, where many millions of dollars in salary and perks are often not enough to recruit a top candidate, wins can come down to making a candidate feel wanted.
Ward said that after learning that one sought-after candidate had attended a performing-arts high school and trained as a classical violinist, the company tracked down a specialty music store in New York and bought him an unusual stringed instrument, which Ward described as a kind of Turkish guitar.
The gift itself wasn’t especially expensive. “It’s the thoughtfulness and the touch and the uniqueness of it,” Ward said.
The company’s CEO, Michael Truell, said on A16z’s podcast last year that Cursor used “crazy recruiting stunts” to score its first 10 hires, including “flying across the world to the person after they say no.”
Ward said Cursor’s recruiting process has become more systematized as the company has grown.
Rather than treating recruiting as a numbers game — message a hundred people, interview whoever responds, and gradually narrow the pool — Ward said he prefers to identify the relatively small number of people who could truly excel at a job and then pursue them deliberately.
“There are 50 people in the world who can do this,” he said, describing the mindset. “Let’s go find those 50 people.”
Then, he said, he “relentlessly” pursues them.
Cursor’s approach reflects the new realities of the AI boom: For those at the top of the market, offering more money may not be enough.
The same coveted engineers can have multiple enormous offers, prestigious jobs, valuable equity, and access to cutting-edge work. Winning them over can come down to whether they connect with a company’s mission and people — and whether they feel understood.
The race has changed the way major companies across Silicon Valley think about hiring, with some of the most aggressive recruiting efforts coming directly from the top.
Mark Zuckerberg has personally emailed AI researchers he wanted to bring to Meta. OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen later said that Zuckerberg had once hand-delivered soup to an OpenAI employee Meta was trying to woo — a tactic that apparently left such an impression that OpenAI began sending soup in its own recruiting efforts.
That’s not to say money doesn’t matter.
Former Google HR chief Laszlo Bock has said that spending $100 million to secure a truly exceptional AI researcher could still amount to a “bargain” for a tech giant, given both what that person could build and the advantage of keeping them away from a competitor.
“You’re getting NBA player-like offers and salaries, and sometimes greater than that,” Ward said.
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