Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Big funnel, very tight filter
Sourcing deals
The deal side works from a prepared mind. At any time the team keeps a list of the top fifteen or twenty industries it finds interesting and force-ranks them as it learns and as market dynamics shift. The best way to learn about an industry is to look at deals in it, so a sourcing engine sees four or five thousand deals a year across the sectors.
Being open to twenty industries makes it more likely that a great business with a great team turns up. It is a big funnel with a very tight filter.
Hiring the same way
Hiring runs the same way. This quarter Long Lake hired three percent of nearly a thousand applicants, and about seventy-five percent of its team comes from in-network referrals. The company is about fifty-five or fifty-six people, ninety percent AI engineers and deployment staff and ten percent in acquisitions and finance, headed toward a hundred by year end.
Three world-class skills
Making it work takes three things at a world-class level: buying great companies well, building technology that rivals the labs or the best applied AI companies, and running change management operations.
Why do referred hires tend to stay?
A 2015 study by Stephen Burks, Bo Cowgill, Mitchell Hoffman, and Michael Housman, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that referred workers were less likely to quit than other hires. A referrer knows both the job and the candidate, so the match is better informed. The referrer's own reputation is also tied to the new hire. The study drew on data from firms in industries such as call centers and trucking.
How do companies manage organizational change?
John Kotter's 1996 book Leading Change laid out an eight-step process for transforming an organization. It begins with creating a sense of urgency and building a coalition of leaders, then moves to a vision and short-term wins. Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, based it on his study of companies that attempted large changes.
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