"Ex-Stripe" on your careers page proves nothing
A logo on a CV says someone passed a hiring bar, not that they made a company win. Three questions to judge what people actually built.
"Our team is ex-Stripe, ex-Palantir, ex-Ramp, and early at Rippling."
That line is on a lot of startup careers pages. It proves nothing.
The reminder comes from next play, a newsletter that helps people choose their next job. Their example: in the 90s, two companies wanted to make online payments work. One was founded by the man who had built VeriFone, with two of the engineers who had built the Internet, including the inventor of the RFCs. The other, by young people with no track record.
The first, CyberCash, went bankrupt. The second was called PayPal.
"Employee #112 at Stripe" says one thing: the person cleared Stripe's hiring bar. Not that they made Stripe win.
Their method for judging a company's talent density comes down to three questions. What real results did these people produce before? Which are they producing now? Does their experience fit the current problem? And one interview question I find formidable: what have you built for the company in the last 30 days, and what effect did it have?
It's written for candidates evaluating a startup. It applies exactly as much the other way around.
When you hire, the logo on the CV is the most expensive and least informative proxy there is. What the person actually built, on the other hand, is often public: their repositories, their PRs, their projects.
That's Azerit's bet: read the work, not the CV. The logo comes after, if it comes at all.
