1. Here is Daniel’s autobiographical Medium essay: “Introducing Pioneer,” August 10, 2018, https://medium.com/pioneerdotapp/introducing-pioneer-e18769d2e4d0. Otherwise, this section about Daniel was written by Tyler alone.
2. See “What Will You Do to Stay Weird?,” Marginal Revolution (blog), December 24, 2019, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/what-will-you-do-to-stay-weird.html#comments.
3. See Peter Cappelli, “Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2019, and Sarah Todd, “CEOs Everywhere Are Stressed About Talent Retention—and Ignoring Obvious Solutions for It,” Quartz, January 15, 2020.
4. See Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX (New York: William Morrow, 2021), 20.
5. While writing this book, we have seen that negative or near-negative yields on safe government bonds are common around the world, covering trillions of dollars in assets. What does that mean operationally? The demand for loans and capital is not so strong as to push interest rates into positive territory, or in other words, capital is not so scarce. What is scarce for successful enterprise is talent.
6. On these points, see Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow, “The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth,” Econometrica 87, no. 5 (September 2019): 1439–1474.
7. See David Autor, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz, “Extending the Race Between Education and Technology,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 26705, January 2020.
8. See Laura Pappano, “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s,” The New York Times, July 22, 2011; “37 Percent of May 2016 Employment in Occupations Typically Requiring Postsecondary Education,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 28, 2017, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/37-percent-of-may-2016-employment-in-occupations-typically-requiring-postsecondary-education.htm.
9. We will not cover the new artificial intelligence programs for talent search, as are used by companies such as HireVue and Pymetrics. It is too early to feed all of the CVs and demographic data and interview tapes into an AI black box and come up with useful answers. There is even talk of measuring brain waves, other real-time biometric data, and social media profiles, but again we are skeptical, at least for the time being. Right now such programs will not remove the need to exercise human judgment, and so that judgment will be the focus of this book. On measuring brain waves and other more speculative options, see Hilke Schellmann, “How Job Interviews Will Transform in the Next Decade,” The Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2020.