Context: someone recently asked me how I approach hiring engineers, so I tried to capture my notes on the subject.
Joel Spolsky once wrote that he wanted people who were “smart and get things done.” He even wrote a book with that title, and the idea has stuck around with me and in tech for good reason. Over time, though, I’ve found that I want the heuristic to be more nuanced. Smart people who get things done can still create friction, duplicate efforts, or build solutions that don’t last. When building my first team, I learned this the hard way when brilliant individual contributors struggled to work together effectively.
That experience started me down a path of refining how I think about hiring—sharpening it further at Mainstay, testing it at Google, and now putting it into practice every day at Suno. What I’ve landed on goes deeper than Spolsky’s original formula…
When building teams, I’m looking for four traits:
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Smart, with EQ
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Hardworking, with impact
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Lifelong learner, with growth
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Kind, with drive
These traits shouldn’t just be buzzwords on a slide. Too many teams throw around lofty adjectives that don’t mean much day to day. For it to mean something, they should be real qualities that actually shape how people work together and solve problems.
1. Smart, with EQ
On strong engineering teams, the ideal is simple: one person goes off and works on one problem. If two people are solving the same exact thing in parallel (and it’s not pair programming), it usually means there’s a miscommunication and the team isn’t working on the right stuff. Instead of stacking solutions and leveraging each other’s work, they’re duplicating effort.
That’s why “smart” matters so much. When you bring on someone smart, you can trust that they’re on average more likely to solve problems in a successful and right way—solutions that are maintainable, scalable, and thoughtful. Note that I said more likely, as it’s still not a guarantee. Some things are hard! And it’s not just about getting something working in the moment, but building in a way that sets the team up for long-term success. We’ve all inherited systems that previous teammates “got wrong.”
But intelligence without emotional intelligence falls flat. We work as teams. The best engineers understand not only the problem but also the people around them. They collaborate well, recognize compromises, and know when to seek input. The combination of problem-solving ability and EQ is what turns an individual contributor into someone who multiplies the effectiveness of the whole team.
2. Hardworking, with Impact
Hard work matters, but not for its own sake. It’s about creating more shots on goal.
Jeff Bezos captured this well in his 2015 shareholder letter, comparing business to baseball. In baseball, the upside of a swing is capped at four runs—a truncated distribution of outcomes. But in business, a single swing can return a thousand runs. That’s the power-law nature of business: a small number of bets generate most of the value. Venture capital works the same way.
I frequently tell my team that in tech, our backlogs are endless—limited only by our imaginations. What matters is knowing which shots are worth taking, and then taking as many of those as you can.
The people who stand out aren’t just busy, they’re effective. It’s not about doing more, but about doing what matters. They align with company priorities, pick their shots wisely, and focus their energy where it counts. Anyone can stay in motion. The real impact comes from getting the right things done.
3. Lifelong Learner, with Growth
One of the great privileges of working in tech is that you’re always learning. The flip side is that you have to always be learning. Unlike fields where tools and methods remain stable for decades, software evolves at a breathtaking pace.
I always say that a carpenter from 1925 could walk into a workshop today and still create something beautiful with familiar tools. They may not know what a Sawstop is or how its flesh-detection safety measure works, but they probably can grok that it’s a saw and that it cuts wood… and it won’t cut your finger. In tech, though, the way we built websites in 2010 looks like a completely different species compared to 2025. Yes the pure fundamentals and foundation is still there, but the advances in languages, frameworks, and best practices have come a long way. And they’re not going to stop changing anytime soon.
That’s why we look for people who embrace learning as part of the job. The best engineers treat growth as a constant: revisiting fundamentals, experimenting with new approaches, and staying curious. I’ll take a curious toddler mindset of “why” any day of the week over someone who “knows how to do it.” The willingness to adapt isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential for staying relevant and building great products.
And it doesn’t have to mean filling a bookshelf with animal-covered tech books. What matters is the mindset. Some people keep up by tinkering with new libraries, reading threads on Hacker News, or following insightful creators on YouTube. Others just can’t stop hacking—building small projects, experimenting, and picking up new skills along the way. However it shows up, that hunger to learn is what I’m looking for.
4. Kind, with Drive
Finally, kindness. Startups run lean, with far less structure than big companies. People fill gaps, make judgment calls, and improvise solutions every day. You’ll often hear phrases like “this is a high-trust environment,” and that’s usually true—but trust doesn’t appear out of thin air. It’s built on kindness: teammates who are patient, generous, and assume good intent.
Kindness isn’t just about being nice. It’s a strategic advantage. When people treat each other well, they share information more freely, they’re less defensive, and they recover from mistakes faster. It creates the wiggle room that fast-moving teams need to take risks without fear. In a startup, that’s oxygen.
Google’s Project Aristotle, which studied what made teams most effective, found that psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of success. Teams where people felt safe to take risks, admit mistakes, and ask questions outperformed those with more raw talent but less trust. And psychological safety doesn’t come from process or org charts—it comes from how people treat each other day to day. That’s where kindness shows up, and why it’s so critical in a startup.
A lot of companies stop here with slogans like “no brilliant assholes.” That’s a floor, not a ceiling. I think kindness deserves to be an explicit positive trait, not just the absence of toxicity. Because I don’t think kindness is in tension with competitiveness or ambition. In fact, I think the opposite is true. The kindest people I’ve worked with are also some of the most driven—they push themselves hard, but they pull others up with them. They create environments where everyone can push harder.
Brilliant jerks slow teams down. They sap energy, break trust, and leave a wake of damage that outweighs their individual contributions. Kindness, paired with drive, sustains teams through the inevitable challenges of startup life—and makes the journey a lot more fun.
And at Suno we have a company value that “fun is underrated.”
Wrapping Up
Hiring at a startup isn’t about ticking boxes on a resume… even if candidates think that’s how to get past the ATS. It’s about finding people who are smart enough to solve hard problems, hardworking enough to take meaningful shots on goal, curious enough to keep growing, and kind enough that you want to be around them.
That’s what I look for, and ultimately what we look for at Suno. If this sounds like you, shoot me a message.