Tobias "Tobi" Konitzer

Recruiters can work for entry-level positions, they can work for commoditized positions, but not for what I'm building.

How do you do it?

There is something that cannot be avoided, which is painful community building.

I looked at decisioning science.

Basically, that is a fancy word for reinforcement learning, Bayesian multi-armed bandits, things like that.

Where does the community live?

It lives in Europe.

Those are companies like Expedia.

There are companies like Zalando, the German multi-billion dollar marketplace.

They've built these systems at scale.

So you start an AI decisioning working group or reading group, and you beg these people to show up.

that have the right background?

And at some point they show up and you observe how they behave in these reading groups.

Do they get the cross pressures of revenue and product building, which we have to face as it's still a fairly early stage startup?

Can they build product under pressure?

Are they purists that are PhDs that just want to prove they're right or they're practical?

And then you go from there.

And then as last, I can give you two other pieces of practical advice that's probably going to get cut.

But I don't hire from business schools, one.

And then two, my preference is to hire PhDs.