Sam Hinkie - Find Your People - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Sam Hinkie about hiring, trust, breadcrumbs, and compounding human advantage. Hinkie argues that great outcomes come from deeply understanding people, their writing and behavior over time, and aligning incentives so talent can compound inside durable organizations.

Main Topics: Interviews as discovery, not interrogation (Priority: 5/5): Hinkie treats interviews as a way to learn how people think, not to trap them. Breadcrumbs and digital trails (Priority: 5/5): He uses writing, posts, videos, and past artifacts to infer trajectory and depth. Power laws in people and recruiting (Priority: 5/5): Exceptional people create disproportionate outcomes, so recruiting quality is central. Trust, relationships, and influence (Priority: 5/5): Durable leadership comes from trust and relationship quality, not command-and-control. Compounding, patience, and long-term games (Priority: 4/5): He favors teams and systems that reward decades-long thinking and steady temperament. APIs, no-code, and specialization (Priority: 4/5): He believes software will keep outsourcing more tasks to specialized tools and APIs.

Key Arguments: Interviews should reveal how someone learns and perceives the world, not test trivia. Breadcrumbs from blogs, posts, and videos show how a person thinks across time. Great hires are often humble about weaknesses and honest about what they don't know. People are a power law: a few exceptional people change everything. Trust compounds over time; infinite games outperform transactional relationships. Modern software should trade money for time and outsource non-core work. APIs and no-code tools will keep expanding because specialization beats reinvention.

Data Points: Expense reviews automated: 85% - Ramp claim in the sponsor message Expense review accuracy: 99% - Ramp claim in the sponsor message Company savings: 5% - Ramp claim in the sponsor message Initial applicant pool: 500 applicants - Patrick describes the hiring process he used with Sam's help Final candidates interviewed: final five or so candidates - Patrick says Sam helped interview the finalists Founder-investor funnel: 500 deals in a year and do five - Sam describes venture as a high-rejection business Small set of trusted people: hundreds, not thousands - Sam says he wants to compound trust with a relatively small circle Fund size: $50 million - Sam describes 87 Capital's first fund Employee scale example: 2,500 employees / maybe 3,000 employees - Sam cites Stripe as an example of written communication scaling Developer and spreadsheet counts: 25 million developers / a billion spreadsheet users - Sam uses this to illustrate the scale of no-code opportunity Performance signal: 45 seconds - James Harden established new team leadership almost immediately Performance burst: 45 - James Harden's score in the next night referenced by Sam

Pivotal Quotes: "All interviewing should be a matchmaking game of who they are and how they see themselves and where they want to be." — Sam Hinkie: On what interviews are really for "I don't care how you got there. It might be instincts, might be actual data, might be something, but you can make a prediction and it became true over time." — Sam Hinkie: On expertise versus experience "People are really a power law too." — Sam Hinkie: On why talent concentration matters in companies and investing

Implications: Listeners should document their thinking publicly and build relationships slowly, because the future advantage lies in making your judgment legible and trustworthy over time.