Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Talent as top priority
When a founder ranks everything that matters, talent often lands at the top. A priority that high leaves no obstacle in effort, resourcing, or time, because it is paramount to the company's success. It cannot be both the most important thing and something outsourced to a recruiting organization.
Founders in the work
Cursor's team hired roughly its first 80 people on its own, so they know how hard it is. They want in on it and show zero ego about who owns what piece. The result is an all-hands effort, and sometimes someone finds out afterward about something that already happened. The trade is worth it for a team that cares this much.
Strategic recruiters
The same logic applies to the people who do the work. There is a supply and demand crisis for truly strategic recruiters, because recruiting has become somewhat transactional over time. Very few can work at this level and in this style, which is why it is a hot take that the recruiting team should be the highest paid team in the company.
Why does delegated work lose its context?
Michael Jensen and William Meckling published their agency theory paper in 1976. They showed that when an owner hands decisions to an agent, the agent's interests diverge from the owner's, and the owner pays costs to monitor and align them. Context is also lost at every handoff, because the person doing the work knows less than the person who set the goal. Delegating a priority therefore requires more oversight than delegating a routine task.
How did recruiting become so transactional?
Online job boards arrived in the mid-1990s, with The Monster Board launching in 1994 and CareerBuilder in 1995. Applicant tracking systems followed, turning candidates into records that move through stages. Software made it easy to handle large volumes of resumes and shifted attention toward processing speed. Recruiting teams grew skilled at throughput with the tools of that era.