Hiring during the Hypergrowth

'Gradient Descending' is a series of roundtables on AI: curated deep dives with technical builders. Past roundtables discussions covered RL Environments, Evals, Fine-Tuning, Agent Frameworks, Open Source Models, and Knowledge Graphs with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Scale AI and many more. For this session, we’re joined by Josh Shih, Head of Underwriting at Corgi, for a conversation about one of the less talked-about parts of building a fast-growing startup: how you actually build the team to keep up with it. Hiring looks very different when the company is doubling quickly, roles are changing every few months and you’re competing for the same small pool of great people. But a lot of those decisions start much earlier — the first 10, 20 or 50 hires can shape how well a company scales later. We’ll talk about what to hire for at different stages, when founders should stop doing everything themselves, how the bar changes as you grow, where hiring processes tend to break and how to move quickly without simply lowering the bar. Expect an honest discussion with fellow builders. Agenda: Arrivals & breakfast: 08:30–09:00Roundtable discussion: 09:00–10:30 See past roundtables here:https://www.akashbajwa.co/t/ai-roundtables I agree that photographs and/or video may be taken during the event and used by the hosts on social media and in future promotional materials.