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Great companies… are structures that let a certain kind of talent finally express themselves.
— Jay Gupta | The next biggest moat in AI
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The People team has one goal: build a winning business by building and keeping the best team on the market. The best strategy in the world is capped by the judgment of whoever runs it. The people and talent work is the business function that owns the ceiling on everything the company can do.
These three jobs apply to every leader building a team at AngelList. What follows is the framework, and then how the People team runs against it.
Job 1: Build a winning business. Is the business set up to win, fiscally and operationally?
Job 2: Build a winning team. Do we have the right people, in the right seats, performing at the right level, with the right incentives?
Job 3: Design conditions where work matches identity. Do what people experience here match who they think they are and who we say we are?
Metric: Invested Capital Volume Growth Rate
We don't own this number and we don't move it directly. We move it through the team we build (Job 2) and the conditions we design (Job 3). But we stay fluent in the business: the market, the unit economics, where growth comes from, so every people decision is made in service of it.
Metric: Talent Density - ICV per head.
This is the job we own most directly. Good companies hire, great companies curate.
A company that hires fills seats. It processes headcount along a lifecycle and measures itself on speed and low friction. A company that curates composes a roster. It treats who is here, at what bar, as the thing that determines everything else.
Hiring asks can this person do the job? Curation asks does this person raise the average?
People work:
No direct metric. Owned through structural levers. The lagging signal is regrettable attrition.
We own key levers that keep experience and identity aligned and to make sure what we promise people is what they actually get.
People work:
Metric: Zero defects (payroll, equity, compliance incidents), and cost-to-serve falling over time.
This is a category of work within the people function that is the machinery of employment. It touches everyone who works here, in any capacity, and it has to work every time. This should be run cleanly and be increasingly automated.