The Junior Engineer Isn’t Needed Anymore: Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree

The junior engineer used to be the safe first hire. Cloë Stanbridge says AI just made that job disappear, and that’s only the start of what’s rewriting tech hiring right now.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree, one of Australia’s most active venture capital firms. Cloë spends her days helping early-stage founders make their first engineering hires and helping later-stage companies scale their teams, work she’s done from both sides, having previously led talent through a hypergrowth stretch at SafetyCulture and embedded inside scaling companies at The Lab17. They get into what actually makes a founder an “outlier” worth backing, why some founders eventually have to admit they’ve become the bottleneck in their own company, why the traditional junior engineer role is disappearing, and how Airtree’s new Frontiers program is drawing hundreds of applications from engineers ready to go out on their own.

It’s a hiring-trenches conversation full of specific, hard-won detail: the real numbers behind scaling a team from 60 to 350 people, why some recruiters place better talent because they simply know the team better, the AI tools on both sides of the hiring desk, and the line that sums up what’s actually scarce in tech right now: everyone can build, not everyone can sell.

About the guest

Cloë Stanbridge is Talent Lead at Airtree, where she partners with the firm’s portfolio to connect founders with top talent, build scalable hiring processes, and develop playbooks that support sustainable growth. Before Airtree, she spent over four years at The Lab17, embedding inside scaling companies including Linktree and Immutable to build out their hiring practices, and led talent through a hypergrowth stretch at SafetyCulture, taking the engineering team from around 60 people to 350 in two years.

Building Tech Teams is produced by DayOne.

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Transcript

Auto-transcribed with AI.

Cloë Stambridge [0:00]: There’s no need for a junior engineer anymore, because those tasks aren’t needed anymore. So the junior is now a mid-level, so to speak.

James MacDonald [0:08]: I think there’s some real advantages on the flip side of the death of the junior engineer. The flip side is, you’re getting a junior engineer who potentially comes in as a mid, but you’re still paying them junior engineering rates.

Cloë Stambridge [0:18]: And we’re seeing it definitely across some of our young founded companies. It’s just kind of moving away from that care factor in a company. And I think it is a bit of a level playing field now, because it doesn’t matter if you’re in a startup or a growth company or big tech. It’s a really hard thing now, and companies maybe need to take a bit of a step back and a reset and understand how they’re going to keep their workforce. I don’t know, it’s a huge topic.

James MacDonald [0:40]: That was Cloë Stambridge. She leads talent at AirTree, one of Australia’s best-known VCs. And her job is a role that most people never see — helping founders make their first hires, helping companies scale. These early hires are the ones that decide whether a company’s going to work.

So in our discussion, we get into what the outlier founders have in common, why the first engineering hire is a choice between someone who’s scaled up before and grads and juniors who might live fast and live in the work, what Cloë looks for in junior engineers now that AI has changed what a junior actually means, and what to do now that your best engineers all have tools to go out and build their own companies on a weekend. How do you deal with that?

Cloë was also one of the only tech recruiters at SafetyCulture when they grew from 60 to 350 people in two years. So she’s been inside companies through growth, through scale, and set up those people and hiring practices. This one’s for anyone who’s making hires within their company, looking to grow and scale their tech teams. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to another episode of Building Tech Teams. On today’s episode, we have Cloë Stambridge, talent lead at AirTree. Welcome, Cloë.

Cloë Stambridge [1:46]: Thanks, James.

James MacDonald [1:47]: AirTree — probably one of Australia’s biggest and most well-known VC companies, invested in plenty of big success stories here.

Cloë Stambridge [1:55]: Yep.

James MacDonald [1:56]: What’s a day-to-day look like inside a talent role, talent lead at AirTree?

Cloë Stambridge [2:01]: Very varied. I’ve been there about 18 months now, so it’s varied over my 18 months, really just following the investment team, the trends and the markets.

Right now, we’re investing a lot in very early stage, pre-seed and seed rounds. So I spend a lot of my time with those founders — deep tech, biotech, still some SaaS in there as well — but helping them attract great talent, leveraging our great network to be able to find great talent for them, building out simple processes so they can make sure they’re hiring the right people, and also just advising on absolutely anything talent-related. So I’d say that’s maybe 60% of my time, being pretty hands-on with them. And then the rest is, again, leveraging our network — exec talent, mostly CTOs, VPs of Eng, amongst go-to-market and ops as well, and making those direct intros.

James MacDonald [2:57]: You’re talking about the real early stage. Do you get involved with looking at the teams, the construction of the teams, when you’re actually considering them as a company to invest in? Or do you get involved at that next stage?

Cloë Stambridge [3:11]: It happens in a few different ways. So we have three core focus areas from the investment team. One is very early stage — we want to find our founders, we want to back them to build great teams, great products, great companies. But they don’t need to have it all worked out, obviously, at that early stage. And then we want to build that relationship with them and go through their entire journey with them.

Or we go in at Venture, which is Series A. And maybe we missed out, or maybe they didn’t do early rounds, and we build with them from there. Or maybe there are large companies that we had missed out on, or looped back to, and want to invest at the growth round as well. So it’s different for every stage. At growth, there’s a lot more due diligence done from the investment team, and also sometimes from a talent perspective. But I would do less with those companies. They’ve got their own talent teams, they know what they’re doing, they’ve got brands in market, et cetera.

But it’s more so the early stage. And usually when we invest, maybe there are two or three people, but it’s usually just the founder or founders.

James MacDonald [4:15]: You mentioned the word outliers for those early stage. Any personality traits that you look for in particular, commonalities between the ones that have had success, for those outliers?

Cloë Stambridge [4:27]: There are a few things. And again, we’ve got six partners, we’ve got four principals, so they’re all running their own investments end to end, so they would have their own personal take. But the common threads that I’ve seen is high agency. A lot of them have worked in some of the great success stories here in Australia, New Zealand as well. And they’ve been, in exception, well-referenced in terms of growth mindset, great culture fits, just building great teams, et cetera. And just super smart.

James MacDonald [5:02]: When you look at that next stage, and they’re going from a single founder — and especially if you’re mentioning deep tech, we’re talking about people that are ridiculously talented, they’ve got a nice niche, they know this space really deep — and you look at that next hire, that next two or three hires. How do you go about helping those teams build from a team of one, or a team of one and two, to add that next couple of people to the team, which can be the difference between them having success or not? How do you go about that? Is it different company to company? Back in the day it used to be you have to have a technical co-founder — it used to be a team of two, a founder and a technical co-founder. Just keen to understand any commonalities, any key pieces of advice that you give.

Cloë Stambridge [5:48]: AirTree’s always invested in tech companies, so predominantly there’s already a tech founder in place. And that’s the starting point. From there, I see two very common buckets.

One is they want to hire folks that have been there, done that. They’ve scaled, they’ve seen it all, they’ve had a success story somewhere else, and they want to be a founding engineer, for example, and build all of that again. Or the second bucket is high potential, maybe has just recently graduated, can build things really fast, and is available 996. They know they’re going to get a lot out of that person.

And I think there are two different founders that want two different types of people. Usually it’s the more experienced founders that say, I want the experienced folks, because they understand the value that they can bring. And usually it’s the younger founders that just want to cast the net wider and bring on more people. I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong answer, it just depends on the company and what they need.

But I would then look at the team. And I can’t share the name of the company, but I’m working with a company right now — a young founder, brought on an experienced chief of staff, which is great to complement his skill set, has an incredible young team of engineers. And the next hire now that we’re looking at — he thought he needed another mid-to-senior. We’re like, well, looking at the team now, and he’s technical himself, the amount of time and effort that he had to put into that team — and he’s getting pulled now into onboarding and customer calls, et cetera. I think now is the time to bring in a lead, who’s still on the tools, deeply technical, but can level that team up for you, so you don’t have to. So, of course, it always depends, but they’re the two big buckets that I see across our portfolio.

James MacDonald [7:39]: It’s a really good point on that founder, that example in particular. If I’ve got a technical founder, they’re passionate about their area, they’ve built the company, and they’ve built that while staying technical, then they’re getting dragged into different parts which aren’t that technical. It’s building a team, it’s a go-to-market, it’s having to start and do finance, et cetera. Have you seen, or do you advise in a particular way, on whether they want to turn into that CEO and play across the board, or stay technical and hire somebody complementary to round them out? Is there a common trait, or is there sometimes you’ve seen one work better than the other?

Cloë Stambridge [8:15]: I think they’ve usually decided this, whether it’s a single founder or two founders or more. They have usually decided that, and then they look to hire around that skill set. Going back to your question around identifying outlier founders, I think one exceptional skill set for them to have is to know their strengths and know their weaknesses, and then hire for those gaps.

With this founder in particular, he is the CEO, but he’s also written most of the code base, because they’re less than a year old. But he is aware that he needs to be quite hands-on at the moment, and he’s just working completely around the clock. But he’s aware, in terms of scaling that business and bringing on that leadership, so he can start to hand over some of that.

James MacDonald [9:01]: Back to the grads — as opposed to going to a senior role, we’re going to go to the grads or more junior role. What do you look for in those grads? There are a lot of conversations around at the moment, because of AI, it’s the death of the junior engineer, you don’t need a junior engineer anymore, the seniors can do more and more. What do you look for in those grads? They can’t have a wealth of experience, they don’t have a resume that says they’ve worked XYZ, maybe they’ve worked at McDonald’s, they’ve done a university grade, and maybe built something. What do you look for in those people?

Cloë Stambridge [9:34]: I think it’s that piece you mentioned there — they’ve built something, so they care deeply about this, they’re spending their free time building and experimenting with tools. I think gone are the days you finish an engineering degree and, as you say, you go in as a junior engineer and you expect to be trained. There’s not much of that happening anymore, and everybody needs to be contributing. And because of the tools nowadays, and because of the rate that everyone’s learning, and because that’s all happening at the same time, I think they need to be building and demonstrating their value.

The question mark I have over that is, the senior engineers can verify and validate what AI is spitting out, because they know the fundamentals and they’ve been in the game for a long time. But I don’t know if there’s a gap there in some of the juniors, in terms of, how do they know if the output — like, how do they evaluate the output?

James MacDonald [10:25]: Yeah. And just because you have increased output, is the quality there? Is it going to live up down the track? Is there a difference between speed and quality at the moment?

Cloë Stambridge [10:36]: Completely, yeah.

James MacDonald [10:37]: And I think that overlaid with — why the conversation exists is around senior engineers understanding good-quality software engineering practices, then overlay this quality tooling, allows them to 10x. The junior engineers that don’t have the understanding of what software works in enterprise, what’s scalable, what’s secure, then overlay with the tooling — they’ve just got the tooling without that understanding, without the war stories. That can be the challenge.

Cloë Stambridge [11:03]: And there’s probably still a space for them in some of the larger companies, because they can’t move as fast or implement these AI-assisted tools as quick. But I think in some of the smaller companies, where they’re starting at zero with their code base — it’s interesting just to see how all of that’s playing out and how they’re contributing. There’s no need for a junior engineer anymore, because those tasks aren’t needed anymore. So the junior is now a mid-level, so to speak.

James MacDonald [11:34]: Yeah, I agree. The companies can’t afford a genuine mid-senior anyway, so they have to go with the junior. And I think there are some real advantages on the flip side of the death of the junior engineer. The flip side is, you’re getting a junior engineer who potentially comes in as a mid, but you’re still paying them junior engineering rates. There are some challenges with it, but there are some advantages as well to going that junior engineer approach.

If you go to the senior — you’re having a look at, a founder’s come up, and they want to hire that senior to help upskill them. I think you’ve written previously around hierarchy. And the hierarchy — just because you sit lower on the chain doesn’t mean that you have to bring less to the table, and the further up the chain you have to bring more. I’d love to get your opinion on that, because at the moment I think there are some founders, and even mid-late-stage companies, who have that fear around bringing in somebody more senior than them, and are willing to not hand over the keys.

Cloë Stambridge [12:26]: Yeah, I mean, it’s a high risk to any business, especially if you’re an inexperienced founder and you’re the CTO. Yes, you’re incredibly smart, but you just don’t have that lived experience. And a lot of companies just don’t want to make the wrong decision, because they know how detrimental that could be to the organisation, to the engineers, and the culture that they’ve built too. So it is hard for them. And then also, what happens to their role? Do they then go into a staff or a principal-level engineer, and then have to report to that person? So I completely get it.

But it’s those founders that have that self-awareness — and I speak to a lot of them within our portfolio — maybe they take that CTO seat until they get to a Series A, and then they realise that they become the bottleneck. And also, they just haven’t built engineering teams, and thinking about all the things that they need to think about. And they actually realise, at that point, I love that build at the start, I want to now move into maybe an R&D role instead. Which works really successfully.

James MacDonald [13:32]: I love that approach, because a zero-to-one is very different to a one-to-five or a five-to-fifty, right? And a zero-to-one takes a particular personality type, which isn’t for everyone.

Have you seen, on the flip side of that — back in the day it was harder to start a company, it was slower to build, it was more expensive to build. Now everyone can build. Do you face a challenge? You’re obviously looking at the absolute best engineers for some of these big companies, the high-growth companies. Do you find challenges at the moment with those mid-senior level engineers who are working within them, that they’re facing a pull to do their own thing?

Cloë Stambridge [14:08]: Yes. We have a new program called Frontiers, and we offer a safe cheque to founders. It’s quarter of a mil. It allows them to leave their day job. They get to be part of a cohort of other founders similar to them. They don’t need to have an idea, but they work in the AirTree office one day a week, we have lunch, we bring someone in from our network to have a conversation with them, and we help them ideate and decide. Maybe it’s co-founder matching.

And when we put the applications out — I don’t know, maybe six weeks ago at this stage — I think we got four or 500, which is insane. And I think that is just one of the incredible things around AI this year. It’s given people the motivation and the ability to be able to do that where they just weren’t able to do that before, because it would take too long to build a product and test it and go to market. So I think that’s 100% giving them the opportunity to do that.

And then also, if you’re in a much larger company that isn’t moving at the same pace as a startup, and you feel like you’re missing out because your company is constrained for whatever reason from using particular tools, you’re going to want to step away. I was speaking to someone in my network recently, and she said that she left her full-time startup gig — she was leading a team of 30 — and she’s like, I just need time to experiment and get back to what she loved doing and use all the tools. And it’s insane, the amount of tools that engineers can use nowadays, but a lot of them will be guided in their organisation — you must use Claude Code, for example, or whatever it might be. So it’s a great opportunity to spend the time to do that. And some of them end up becoming founders.

James MacDonald [15:55]: On the flip side then, if you put yourself — you’re advising a founder, you’re advising a CEO of one of the companies you’re investing in. They’re at risk of losing these great engineers because they want to do their own thing. Potential CGT changes make ESOP less appealing, potentially. How do we go about building culture, building upside for the people to stay within your company? Because I think you can talk about traditional things, maybe ESOP, salary potentially, but these people are wired to build now. How do we go about keeping those engineers within your company?

Cloë Stambridge [16:31]: I’ve seen this real trend now that teams are becoming leaner. Obviously everyone’s seeing the redundancies that are happening across the market, and it’s happening sometimes across the mid-management layer.

And if you are a manager now in a tech company, you need to be hands-on. I remember going through this kind of change, probably eight to ten years ago, where they wanted to separate — if you’re building, well, then you don’t have capacity to lead your team, and we had cross-functional teams, engineering managers would just lead the team of eight engineers, they’d work with product managers and the designers and make sure there was velocity and they were delivering on time, et cetera. Now it’s like, no, scrap that. If you’re in a team and you’re at that level, you need to be an architect. You need to be setting the roadmap and working with your engineers to get the best out of them.

And I think it means now that we’re caring less about leadership, and growing people, and motivating personally, and sharing candid feedback, which I think is a real shame. And then also introducing some of this more US 996 culture. And we’re seeing it definitely across some of our young founded companies. It’s just kind of moving away from that care factor in a company.

And I think it is a bit of a level playing field now, because it doesn’t matter if you’re in a startup or a growth company or big tech — you’re exposed to redundancy in any organisation, because things can change so quickly. So I think it’s a really hard thing now, and companies maybe need to take a bit of a step back and a reset and understand how they’re going to keep their workforce.

But you also don’t want to do it with golden handcuffs, because you’re going to have people that are clocking in and clocking out and they’re just there for the money. So it’s such a hard balance to get right. They need to be motivated by the work that they’re doing. They need to be around great people. They need to have flexibility that suits their life. So I don’t know, it’s a huge topic.

James MacDonald [18:39]: Yeah, I completely agree — because you mentioned the 996 as well. And you can understand why it’s happening, because of the speed everything’s moving. If you want to get any form of investment in your company, they want to see growth, they want to see you hitting outcomes, they need to see you moving fast, because globally it’s moving so fast. But then the flip side of that is engineers are potentially going to move on, they’ve got more opportunities now, and companies are spending less on leadership and less on management.

The middle layer of management is the layer in danger, especially the non-technical people. In the past they may have been the best people managers — because back in the day you used to either go down the technical route or the people manager route. I feel like that’s squeezed. How do companies go about trying to continue to build that management if they’re squeezing the roles that aren’t technical? Maybe they’re worried more about the code than how the person’s feeling, their mental health, whatever it might be. How do you see that playing out longer term, or how would you advise companies dealing with that?

Cloë Stambridge [19:34]: I think a lot of early stage companies hire people and talent too late. I think they underestimate the value, because maybe they just haven’t seen what good looks like, or they just haven’t thought about it too much, which I think is a real shame. And a lot of them will use a range of different recruiters or embedded talent, or whatever that might be, and just not have consistency throughout.

And same on the people side of things — having someone early on who cares about this, whether that’s a people lead or a head of people, or maybe it’s a chief of staff who cares about this, or someone in ops. Putting lightweight programs and putting things in place.

Going back to that company I was referring to earlier, in the deep tech space, they’ve just hired a chief of staff, and he and I are working really closely to work out — the company’s growing rapidly, we’ve got these three young engineers, how do we make sure that we keep them engaged, they know that we care about their career, their performance? We’re setting expectations around salary increases, about equity, we’re asking them what they want. Because especially in that field, I feel like they’re less inclined to be more open with management, maybe less so than sales or go-to-market. And one day they’ll just resign, and the team will have no idea about it, and they haven’t planned for this.

So I think building those fundamentals in really early, or knowing what your talent strategy is, and having the right person to execute across that as well — whether that is external recruiters or embedded — but just having a plan in place, and making sure that that’s the best person to represent your brand. Because outside of marketing, they’re the ones that are doing the most work on your brand in market. So just thinking about how you make those hires, when the right time is to bring them in, so that cracks don’t start to appear when you’ve gotten too big.

James MacDonald [21:34]: I think you mentioned motivators. In the hires that I’ve been across, I think finding that alignment on a motivator tends to be the thing that can keep people sticky. It might be — I’m motivated to play in a particular industry, or with a particular tech stack, or to solve a particular problem. And that can be the thing that keeps people sticky, as opposed to jumping for a few extra dollars, or a company with a bigger brand.

Cloë Stambridge [21:58]: Completely agree. Leadership is hard, it really is. I love Brené Brown, Kim Scott, the people that have written all about this. And Brené always says it’s harder than being a parent. And I think that’s right, but I think there are some basics that companies can invest in, and just support their leaders to ask those questions.

Not jumping in — first of all, let’s hope there are one-on-ones — but not jumping in and getting straight to work. How are you doing? How are you feeling about everything? There were some changes that were made. And just building that trust, so that when you do need to have a difficult conversation, whether that’s on both sides, you’ve got that trust, that transparency, and you just know that that other person cares about you.

James MacDonald [22:41]: More of our leaders are now probably coming from a technical background, rather than a people management background. Mid-level companies, that’s where the thing’s at, or a smaller startup, you’re the technical co-founder — again, probably coming from a technical background, you haven’t been taught this. You mentioned companies can be late in coming to the party and actually looking at a talent strategy, or looking at how we’re going to take care of people, looking at how to actually conduct a one-on-one.

Previously to AirTree, you spent some time with Lab 17. Lab 17’s model, from my understanding, is you go into a scaling-up company and embed yourself and build out these practices. Talk to me about that strategy, how you’ve seen that work successfully. A lot of companies, as they’re going through a growth phase, it’s just, let’s hire more engineering, more engineering, or go-to-market — not, let’s look at people.

Cloë Stambridge [23:29]: Yeah, and that was the pitch. We’re going to get more bums on seats. You’ve got a bottleneck in hiring — whether that’s me, whether that was someone in my team, whether that was a group of us, it would really depend. But we would come in and just slowly build trust. We start hiring, but then you start to see the cracks in the processes. You start to build relationships, and then you’re able to influence.

And there was never a playbook, but there were always the same issues that we’d identified — in terms of, no one’s ever gone through interview training, no one understands the reason why we have these processes in place, or maybe there aren’t any processes. Maybe it’s, you meet the hiring manager and then, oh, I’m going to get you to meet this engineer in my team, and we’ll do a technical test. And it sounds good, but there’s no accountability across the interview process. There’s no one having those conversations with the candidates. All these basic things that you and I are aware of, but most people actually aren’t, if they’re not in a talent role. So helping them build this, but building credibility first through the hires that we would make.

And it was incredible. I was there for four-plus years. The business had been around for five years at that stage, but we got to go through that big wave — COVID, post-COVID — of some big, meaty Series B, Series C stages of growth companies in Australia, like Linktree, Immutable, Scheduflow, and having a real part to play in helping those businesses grow. But yeah, it was always a combination of a few different things, and just little tweaks. And it always comes down to building relationships and then influencing.

James MacDonald [25:15]: I like the idea of influencing and earning trust first and then influencing, because it’s hard to make change without that trust built first. If a company is looking to grow, they don’t have any of this built out at the moment, they’re starting from scratch, they’ve been winging it — what are your first two, three things that you can advise them on?

Cloë Stambridge [25:34]: Just pausing and understanding exactly what they’re looking for, where that person fits in, and what success looks like for the next six to twelve months. I think sometimes they’re like, I see this problem, I need someone to solve this problem right now. And they don’t think beyond that and understanding what success looks like in a year.

So one example is, I was working with an early stage company, and it was predominantly two founders and an engineer, and they said, we need someone to go to market, we just don’t have time, we’re engineers, that’s not a strength of ours, so we just need someone who is very experimentative. And ultimately they set that person up for failure, because they didn’t know what they expected of that person in the first six to twelve months. And of course, as soon as they didn’t reach the expectations that they had set in their minds, friction broke down and it didn’t work out. Which I think was unsurprising when I was doing a bit of a retro with them. And I’ve seen this happen so many times.

And the second piece then is, obviously a founder is a founder for a reason. They’re usually a visionary, they have full belief that their company is going to work — they have to, or they won’t succeed. They don’t understand that other people need to be brought on that journey as well. So when they are interviewing, they don’t think about the candidate’s perspective, and they’re not just asking those simple questions throughout. Did you enjoy that interview? Any questions, any concerns? What’s your timeline looking like? Are you interviewing anywhere else? And just building that relationship with them, rather than it being just very robotic.

James MacDonald [27:04]: One-sided.

Cloë Stambridge [27:04]: One-sided. And then they get to an offer and they’re like, I know they’ve accepted something else — and they’re like, we’ve just wasted all this time. So I think that’s another one.

And then just putting some sort of process in place. Make it lightweight, it’s super easy to do now, obviously with AI, with note takers, there’s no admin needed. But just knowing what you want. What are your negotiables, your non-negotiables? Breaking that down into having key people interview for them, and then running through that process, so you’ve got high confidence when you do actually make that hire.

James MacDonald [27:49]: Yeah. I think the post-COVID boom was a real turning point. When you’re having a look at it, interviews turned from a one-sided — the company has all the power, especially the big brand, all the power, plenty of applicants, quality applicants too — and now the market’s flipped. Any tech professional that’s willing to move has potentially five-plus opportunities out there. And companies needed to actually learn how to sell themselves in an interview, not just, well, I’ve got all the power, and they want to come, well, I’m going to offer them money.

I think there’s more of that happening right now, especially with these really senior — whether it be a forward-deployed engineer or just an AI engineer — those people are in high demand at the moment. There’s talk of people being offered money through the roof, especially international remote roles as well. When is the time for a company to pull out the half-a-million-dollar-plus salaries for these engineers? Where have you seen that work? Where have you seen it go wrong? Because people can argue both ways, and there’s plenty of companies paying for that and doing very well. I’d love to hear your opinion.

Cloë Stambridge [28:55]: Again, I can’t name names, but there are two companies that spring to mind. One who hired an exceptional engineer and pulled out the big bucks, and that was their founding engineer, because they had the awareness. They knew that they needed — like, there’s CTO and CEO co-founders, but they knew they needed to get someone who was a returner from America, someone with that experience. And they were like, we are happy to pay. We don’t ever see us having a massive team — small team, really high quality, and happy to pay.

Another time I saw that was more on the go-to-market side, where they hired someone who was too experienced. And I think this happens a lot — you hire someone from big tech, and it just doesn’t translate well into an early stage startup. Because it’s a completely different landscape. From the candidate’s perspective, they want to have a bigger impact and all the great things. But then they come on board and they realise how exposed they are, or the amount of work that is involved, or the fact that they have very little support around them. And it doesn’t work out.

So I think if you are hiring someone at that high salary, make sure it’s for the right reasons — because they’re absolutely worth it and they’re bringing a skill set that you don’t have. But don’t hire someone who’s very expensive just because that’s what they were getting paid in big tech.

James MacDonald [30:26]: I agree. And I think there is a time — the other part is, especially for that engineer, if it is your founding engineer, those people can help you attract other people down the track as well. So whilst you are forking out a significant amount of money, the difference that they can make — they can legitimately 10x your company if you get the right one at the right time. I think people will oversee that and just look, oh, that’s a lot of money for one person, without looking at the ongoing tangibles.

Cloë Stambridge [30:52]: Just to add to that one — you need to set that person up for success. Again, it is a very high salary, and early stage companies are very cash-sensitive. So just making sure, this is the role that we’re going to pay for, this is what makes most sense, and let’s set them up for success.

James MacDonald [31:08]: You’re working with some of the bigger companies and the biggest success stories in Australia. Have you seen any challenges with them with international remote roles, where there is significantly — these salaries in Silicon Valley at the moment are astronomical. In Australia, we’ve got these big success stories, companies that are doing well, highly profiled, would have traditionally been easy to hire for because of the brand as well. How do they go about competing for these top engineers?

Cloë Stambridge [31:37]: I think what has worked well — and there’s one company that springs to mind, Linktree — I think what’s worked really well for them is they’re bringing Australian culture into the US. In terms of flexibility, ways of working — everyone is feeling this intensity, this high pace, which I’m not saying they do not have, but they’ve built a company exceptionally well to make sure that that’s managed really effectively. So with Linktree, I think that’s the one thing that they’ve done exceptionally well, and that’s their differentiator, because it’s just a different style of working. They’re still getting the same output. And going back to as well, they’ve got great leadership in place, they’ve got exceptional benefits. So it’s just something that’s a bit of a differentiator.

I think other companies absolutely do struggle. So when they do go to market, they need to offer something that’s different. Because if you reach out to buy — an Australian company you’ve never heard of, they’re like, yeah, they’re backed by VCs that you’ve never heard of, there’s going to be high risk. So it’s like, what can we offer that’s a bit different? Is it higher equity? Is it a bigger title? Is it more ownership? And I think just working through that.

James MacDonald [32:52]: You mentioned the work-life balance part there. Work-life balance was definitely a big thing for the last couple of years, I think. And now we’ve gone through this phase where a lot of people are just looking for stability because of the economic environment, people looking for cash over flexibility because of the cost of living crisis. There’s also an expectation with AI now that people have to do significantly more — they can do significantly more, so they should do significantly more.

I’m going to ask, by the way, because we’re hearing more and more about burnout — have you seen companies, how would you advise companies on trying to run as quick as we need to to keep up with the tech market, build quick, and try to look after your staff, and not have them still be around for the next two to three years?

Cloë Stambridge [33:40]: That’s really hard. It’s really hard. I’ve seen some exceptional founders who have gone really far one way and been successful, like building credible programs for their people, and then go the complete opposite. And I think it’s just about knowing the culture that you want to build, really sticking to it, and then hiring the right people into that.

There are some companies in the market that are very upfront about their culture. It’s in their job description — no surprises here. You’re going to come in, you’re going to work hard, but you’re going to get very well compensated. And there will be an exit at some point, and it’s going to be life-changing. So I think just putting it to candidates, so they completely understand that and they know what they’re getting into. Rather than going in and joining a company and — it’s very different from the outside.

And looking back at all the companies that I’ve worked with, I think it’s always really important to build that in consistently into an interview process, and not scare a candidate off, but just have a very candid chat with them at the end and say, this is the environment, this is what it’s going to be like, are you ready for that? And I actually had that conversation with someone recently, and he was like, yep, I spoke to my partner, we know this is going to be intense, but it’s going to be so worth it, I’m going to love every minute of it, and hopefully there’s a payday at the end of it.

James MacDonald [35:05]: And even if you don’t love every minute of it, you know that that’s what you’ve signed up for. If you’ve got that end goal, you can get through that 12-hour day, you can get through that 70, 80-hour week, knowing that, hey, whilst I’m not spending as much time with my family, this is the end goal, and we agreed on that.

Cloë Stambridge [35:20]: Yeah. And one thing that I am seeing as well — and I don’t know if engineers like this or they don’t like this — but a lot of companies are moving back into the office. There are still a handful of the portfolio that are remote-first, and they work exceptionally well. But I think when you are in the office and you have that team camaraderie, you can really build a culture that way. As long as you’re surrounded by people doing the same thing as you and feeling the same things, it’s definitely helpful.

James MacDonald [35:48]: Yeah, I think some companies have done remote really well, and they’re fully bought into it, and it’s not just, we’re working remotely and working the same practices we did previously. But outside of that, I think the companies that are remote are at a higher chance of their staff looking around. It is nearly impossible to build the same culture fully remote as it is in the office, outside very few companies. And those are the companies I think are at highest risk of losing their top talent.

Cloë Stambridge [36:15]: Yeah, I agree. You do have less visibility, and I don’t think founders want to admit that they want visibility over their teams, which they should. And they say, oh, decisions get made quicker. I think there needs to be some degree of flexibility. Like at AirTree, we’re in the office three days, but a lot of people come in on the other two days as well. Me personally, I just love it. I need to be around people. I’m in the zone, and it’s like, oh, can I just grab you for this, or whatever that might be, and you get to outcomes quicker. But venture is very different to a tech company, and I guess if there are engineers that don’t need to collaborate as much and they get their best work done, it’s about finding that balance.

James MacDonald [36:55]: You mentioned go-to-market a couple of times now. And I think the role of go-to-market has increased in popularity, it’s increased in importance. Everyone can build now — I’d use that with an asterisk, we can build at various qualities. I can build very loosely, engineers can build well, everyone can build. Not everyone can sell. Not everyone can understand what a customer is looking for. Are we building for the sake of building? Are we building something that no one’s going to buy? What does that look like?

You mentioned before, in one of the examples, that one of the go-to-market people wasn’t set up for success, because it is a different role. So an engineer might build really well-built code, really well-built product, but not understand what the market needs. Lots of pressure on go-to-market. I’d love to get your opinion on what you’re seeing in the market with go-to-market, the changing nature of the role, where that’s working.

Cloë Stambridge [37:46]: I think a lot more Australian companies need to get to the US quicker. I’m seeing a real push for that, definitely. And some founders are just going straight over there as well, because bigger customer base, more enterprise organisations if that’s what they’re selling into, et cetera.

James MacDonald [38:05]: Valuations?

Cloë Stambridge [38:05]: Yeah, absolutely. So I think what a lot of the companies are doing, whether the founder’s here or over there, is they’re hiring their VP or their GM for the US or for Europe, depending on what they’re selling, very early on now. Going back to those big salaries — invest, get the right person, and then support them with a solid team of AEs.

I don’t know how it’s changed — maybe there are less SDRs now because of AI, and because of how fast BDMs can move. I’m kind of less across that. But I think just building outside of Australia sooner is one of the big themes.

James MacDonald [38:48]: Have you seen more success with an Australian-based company moving an Australian that knows the product or company over to the US, or hiring somebody in the US that knows the US market and has to learn the company? Have you seen either way work better than the other?

Cloë Stambridge [39:05]: No. And it’s hard, because you need to decide where you want the centre of gravity to be. If you want HQ here because you can hire engineers and there are allowances and tax incentives to be able to do so, and that makes sense, and then you maybe go to market in the US, or you just skip and go straight over there and hire teams — I don’t know.

But what I have seen is a lot of our founders at the moment are in the US, and they’re spending long stints there. And they’re doing that for good reason. Whether they end up coming back here and have someone, I think it’s so important for them to build that relationship with the person that they hire. And usually they are hiring a VP of sales or a similar title over there, or chief revenue officer. But making sure that there’s that consistency in terms of the culture, and they’re getting product feedback and they’re building those relationships. I think that’s what’s most important.

James MacDonald [40:10]: Taking on capital is not forever, taking on VC is not forever. Where are you getting the money from? Is there an expectation now, do you think, if a company is growing and going to take on money, and you’re a founder, that you are going to have to move to the US and spend some time over there?

Cloë Stambridge [40:27]: Yeah, look, if that’s where your customers are, yes, I do think so. And also, if that’s where your customers are, you’re most likely going to want US investment at some point. So you need to start building those relationships too, which can sometimes take time, especially for some of those bigger rounds.

James MacDonald [40:46]: I think it’s just something that people should be aware of, and maybe not everyone is aware of, when they’re growing a company, have bigger aspirations, and think that, we are made in Australia, I want to build it here, I want to build my team here. Yes, but with a pretty significant part.

Cloë Stambridge [41:01]: Yeah. And I can see the pull to the US. We want to maintain as much great talent here and create more great talent here in Australia, naturally, because we predominantly invest in Australian and New Zealand founders, whether they’re here or in the US or elsewhere. The market’s just moving incredibly fast over there, and there are cultural differences here. And I think there’s a big opportunity now for us to help build Australian talent, and hopefully we’ll get people who go to the US and they come back.

James MacDonald [41:34]: It’s a really good point. And I think a lot of people are working on that — how do we do a better job in Australia of attracting talent back? I think there’s a really good opportunity for engineers to go abroad, potentially faster-moving or bigger companies, or companies that have got more investment. Take that, learn the experience, and then bring it back. How do we go about accelerating that, getting more of that? Having that experience — you said before, some of the founders that have had the most success have hired someone that’s been there, done that.

Cloë Stambridge [42:05]: Most of the candidates that I speak to are coming back because they want to be closer to family and they want a different lifestyle. But a lot of them really miss the pace and the opportunities. So I think it’s about creating more of that here. And I think we’re doing a great job. I mean, CGT — where that lands and what happens there, that could actually be quite detrimental. But I think we need to invest in things that keep great talent here and attract great talent back as well.

James MacDonald [42:36]: You’ve done the startup, you’ve worked agency side previously — we won’t talk about the dirty agency side. But you’ve also worked at SafetyCulture as well, through one of their big growth phases, a couple of years there. Can you talk to me about that experience? You hired — oh, you tell me — how many people when you started, versus when you left there?

Cloë Stambridge [42:57]: I joined at probably about 60 people when I joined. We were across two small floors in a small office — that was Sydney. We also had Townsville, and a small office in Manchester as well. And they’d just raised Series A. And then I was there for two years, left when there were maybe 350 people. So it was exceptional growth. I led recruitment for all of engineering, and then through my time took on product and design as well. So I ended up building the whole cross-functional org, mostly in Australia, Sydney and Townsville. And the team have an office in Kansas City as well, but there was no engineering or product or design over there — that was all go-to-market.

James MacDonald [43:40]: What did that look like? Talk to me about the pace, the challenges that you would have faced, going from a 60-person organisation where I imagine you knew pretty much everyone, to that speed as well. It’s not just the increase in numbers, it’s the speed. How do you go about building that talent acquisition? How do you go about building culture? How do you go about going through that experience?

Cloë Stambridge [44:05]: It was phenomenal. Such an incredible time. I’d just moved out of agency, so there was so much that I didn’t know, and they were very kind to let me learn all of that on the job. I joined, worked closely with the VP of engineering, who had also probably just joined a few weeks before I had. And the brief was, we need software engineers. That’s about it. Like, he was just — engineers.

So we ended up building really great processes and hired a lot of individual contributors, but I had free rein. I had access to all the tools. I was recruiting a lot from overseas, relocating folks here to Townsville and to Sydney. And it wasn’t, we need this one engineer to fit into this specific role. So it was really, I was able to cast the net wide, but built processes, had just an incredible team then who were kind of the core people that I would use for that interview process.

And then everything was going really well, and then all these engineers came on board, and it was like, oh wait, we need to hire leaders, because who are all these people going to report to? And then we’re like, okay, let’s pause on all of these, let’s hire leaders. And that was kind of how my career at SafetyCulture went. It was like, oh, now we need leaders, go hire leaders. Oh, we don’t have enough product managers, go hire product managers. Now we need to complement that with designers. And that’s how I moved through the org.

But I think some of the things that helped us be really successful was, we just had such a solid team that lived and breathed SafetyCulture. So also sharing that story in the market, five, ten times a day, authentically, I think just massively helped. We had built a great culture. We made sure that we introduced a values-based interview, to make sure that everyone that came on board was aware of our values and was going to thrive in the environment.

And things definitely broke along the way. We ended up making a hire at one point, and I think it turned out that maybe it wasn’t him that had actually done the technical take-home task. And that became evident really quickly. And we’d also relocated him from overseas. And that was a bit of an, okay, the wheels are spinning very fast here, but we just need to take a breath and reassess the process. So then we tweaked a few things — like, now it’s going to be an in-person technical challenge, for example, or for hiring anyone from overseas, we need to fly them in for a few days to meet the team. So we’re crystal clear that this is going to be the right person.

But yeah, it just came back to putting those processes in place, building great relationships with the team. I was very fortunate, because I was the only recruiter in tech at SafetyCulture, so I knew every single person in that team, because I’d taken them all through the interview process. So when I spoke to new candidates, I was able to talk in depth about the team that they would be joining. I joined their stand-up, so I knew exactly what they were building. So I loved going really deep, understanding it so well, and being able to pitch it really authentically.

James MacDonald [47:04]: I think there are two points there you mentioned. Last part first — you mentioned the relationship between talent and the actual hiring managers. I know it from a recruitment perspective — we’re external, we come in, work with the company. Companies I’ve worked with 10 years, I know them inside out. I know their dog’s name. I know the type of people that are going to work in the team versus not. I think sometimes, whether it be internal or external recruitment or talent partners, the lack of time that’s invested in that relationship upfront makes everything a poorer experience across the board. And it’s harder and harder to actually get that fit right.

How do you go about building that relationship when you’re going in working with one of these new companies that you’re investing in at the moment?

Cloë Stambridge [47:46]: I always just start by asking them a bunch of questions and showing a true interest. I need to be able to understand a company and a product and how it works. So for example, this deep tech company that I’m working with at the moment — just spending time with the founder, getting him to explain exactly what the product does, why this is the best product in market, what kind of questions candidates are going to ask, et cetera.

And I think just through that curiosity — there are a lot of recruiters out there that are brought up in the industry, and they’ve just been told to sell instantly. And I’m like, you don’t need to do the talking. You just need to ask a few questions and get them to open up. And I think that curiosity is really helpful. And then the next stage to that is, I like this candidate because of this, but I don’t like this candidate because of that. And they know you’re just not trying to push a candidate onto them, and being that kind of sounding board, that thought partner. And then they realise, okay, you are actually genuine, authentic, you care about what we’re building. So just having that high care factor.

James MacDonald [48:47]: The other part you mentioned before, at SafetyCulture — I think when you were growing really fast, you were hiring people, but you weren’t looking for something that just fit in a box. I’d love you to just explain that in a little bit more detail, because I see a lot of people like, I think I know what I want, and they’ve got 10 dot points they think they need. And if you’re not those 10, you’re not going to be the right fit. As opposed to — and it ties into your other piece around hiring for the future — what are the core skills you’re looking for, having a bit of room to wiggle around the sides, and they can be your best hires? I’d love you to just explain that concept.

Cloë Stambridge [49:23]: Back then it was a time where most people were hiring end-to-end JavaScript engineers, or Go along on the back end, and whatever else that might be. And that was the box that you were trying to fill. I think the engineering managers and the leadership team at the time were like, we just need to hire really smart people, really great engineers, who are technology-agnostic and are happy to learn whatever.

And this was proven really early. They hired someone who was a Java engineer, and he said, just give me two weeks and I’ll take the Go lang test, or whatever it was. And he absolutely smashed it. And they’re like, these are the types of people that we need — they’re problem solvers, they’re not just a .NET engineer, a Java engineer, whatever it might be. So I think that was really useful to find, and then we’d fit them in.

That was probably for the first six to twelve months. After that, when we had a lot of the engineers in place, it was like, okay, now we’ve actually got gaps that we need to fill, because we’ve got an IoT team, or we’ve got a mobile team, and we need specific people. But yeah, it was very fun. It was just about finding those key things. Initially that was, this is high agency, high performer, problem solver, and they just want to do good work.

James MacDonald [50:39]: Do you think that only becomes more and more important in the age of AI? I think tools are changing so quickly. You can ask somebody, how well are you working with these tools at the moment? These tools, for most of them, they’ve not been playing with for more than 12 months. How do you think that problem solver, that attitude part, becomes more important for you hiring now than their actual technical capability?

Cloë Stambridge [51:01]: I think technical capability has to be there — or the mindset of, if I don’t know, I’ll figure it out, but I’m not going to waste too much time doing that. So there needs to be a level of competence there. But I also think outside of that is just someone who wants to be solving those kinds of problems. When I flip this back — any time I talk to a candidate, nine times out of ten, when I ask them what they’re looking for, they’re like, maybe I want to work in health tech or sustainability, but ultimately they don’t care about the product that they’re building. They just want to be working with great people, have autonomy, and solve something that is in customers’ hands. So I think if you can match that up, and you’re getting people that can connect on the same type of level outside of the technical thing, I think that’s nearly more important.

James MacDonald [51:47]: Okay, if we go to the technical aspect then — you mentioned before, mishap with a candidate — talking about technical competency being the most important thing. AI, interviewing for AI skills. What’s your current thought process? What’s your current take on how you actually take somebody through that process? I think the game’s changing pretty significantly. I’d love to get your opinion on how you go about hiring engineers in the time of AI.

Cloë Stambridge [52:17]: Yeah, I definitely think this one has flipped. In terms of, we’re not just going to have this kind of standard test anymore, and it’s probably more around moving it back to technical and behavioural-based questions, rather than seeing what they can build. Because by the time they get to that stage in the process, they probably should have been able to show you something that they’ve built anyway, and being able to talk through it and their thought process behind it.

The companies that I’m working with in the portfolio, they’ll ask questions around their existing product, and say, this is a problem that the team have recently solved, how would you go about solving it? So then you’ve actually got something to validate and verify, and then say, okay, well, if this was the case, how would you change that? So I think it’s coming back more to, how would you solve this, and these are all the tools that you can use, why would you use that over this, and the philosophy behind it.

James MacDonald [53:09]: I agree. I think that is the best. And again, it’s significantly easier for seniors as opposed to juniors, because giving them a problem and talking through — okay, what’s the hardest, how would you architect this, what are the challenges you might face, why would you pick this over that — that’s a better process for a senior principal engineer. The juniors, that’s the harder part, where they don’t have that core understanding of the architectures, where the pitfalls they might fall into. So I think that’s the harder challenge at the moment.

Cloë Stambridge [53:38]: Well, one thing that we are seeing across a lot of roles across the portfolio is bringing them in for a day — sometimes it’s more than a day, which can cause a little bit of controversy, especially if you’re employed by another company. Which is getting someone in, working with the team, seeing how they think. And most of the time I think it does work out, because they build that kind of high level of confidence throughout the interview process, so that’s kind of confirming it when they bring them in. But at least from a candidate perspective, you know exactly what you’re walking into then.

James MacDonald [54:11]: Oh, I think in a perfect situation, you do that for every job, right? Understanding how people interact, communicate, work with others. A couple-of-day trial would be a perfect situation in every instance.

Cloë Stambridge [54:21]: Yeah, but again, you need to be able to set that up. So you’re able to build that thoughtfully and do it in the right way, so you’re setting them up for success.

James MacDonald [54:32]: It’s a significant investment, right? Because you’re actually asking some of your team members to take time out of what they’re doing day in, day out, to essentially coach or work with this person. Significant investment for the future.

You mentioned the interview process. What does that look like before we get to an interview process? A lot of the time, I imagine you’re building people from within your network, and that’s what you do really well, and that’s what AirTree does very well. But outside of that, you’re going to have to advertise for roles, I imagine. At the moment, there’s talk of candidates that are using AI for their CVs to tailor them for a particular job ad. On the flip side, there’s talk in the market about companies using AI to assess candidates. So we’ve got AI versus AI. We’ve got a candidate using AI versus a company using AI. Where do you currently see it, on what a good job application process looks like?

Cloë Stambridge [55:25]: What I do — and I recruit a lot for AirTree as well — what we do for every role is put in screening questions for the application, because we want to screen out as much AI slop or the wrong type of profile, so I or my AI don’t have to review it. And that really, really helps. We’ve advertised some roles recently, and we’ve gotten half the candidates that I would expect to get, and that is great, because they have to answer those questions.

Where I get frustrated is, in those questions, they’re using AI. Which, again, it’s fine if you need that to formulate your thoughts and communicate it effectively — but it’s now repetition. So one question that we always ask is something around AirTree, what do you know about AirTree in the market? And it’s always the same. “This genuinely excites me”, and it reads like AI.

James MacDonald [56:17]: You’ve either got the Claude response, you’ve got your Gemini response, your ChatGPT response.

Cloë Stambridge [56:21]: And I think they’re all thinking the same as well, because it’s going to scrape certain things from our website. So think — just be authentic for those. Like, if you’re doing a cover letter — I completely understand, yes, use AI to write your CV, that makes perfect sense, make sure it’s hitting all the points that you need in the job description, and it’s giving the reader a really clear understanding of why you’re successful for this role. Completely agree with that.

What I do, especially when I’m learning about a new space like biotech, deep tech — my background is predominantly SaaS — I will create a skill in Claude that will help me evaluate a candidate, especially if it’s an interview that I’ve done and I’ve had a note taker, because I just want to be able to succinctly understand whether or not that candidate has hit the mark. And then I’ll say, yeah, I agree with this, or I don’t, and that’s where I’ll edit and change my feedback. But that has saved me so much time, and we can get through so much more top of funnel so much quicker.

What I don’t agree with is when it cuts out the human element of it all. Like, I think that’s the part that can’t be replaced in our industry by AI — and our industry is talent, not VC. There’s still that deep human connection. I don’t agree with you interviewing with AI as your first step. I think AI can do enough to screen before that, and then the first is, okay, we’re having a phone call now, we start building that rapport and relationship and go from there.

James MacDonald [57:52]: Definitely. And definitely in our space. I think it could be slightly different if we’re talking about significantly high-volume — people that might be working in a call centre, might be working on a factory line, and we’re just talking high volume. I think there could be a space for the voice agents for that significantly high volume. But to your point, that human element — you’re trying to attract top talent out of where they’re going at the moment, that needs another human to have that conversation, understand the motivators you’re talking about before.

One last part before we finish up. The AI you just mentioned — you’re using note takers at the moment, you’re using it for helping you collate your thoughts and bring different things together so your messages are tighter. Where else are you using it day to day? Where have you seen the biggest benefits for you personally?

Cloë Stambridge [58:39]: I think the whole research piece for finding candidates. I have experimented with some of the tools out there, like Juicebox, for example. But I think just getting it to pull a market map together for me — again, going back to these new industries that I haven’t worked in before. I have a good sense about some other industries in SaaS, or some verticals, but just wanting to know who’s who. And then helping A, B, C grade those companies and their relevance to sourcing candidates for the companies that I’m working with. That has been phenomenal. You just prompt it really well, go off and do something else, let it rip, and you come back and it’s so, so helpful. There’s always going to be things that it misses, but if it’s going to do 80% of the work for me —

James MacDonald [59:24]: That’s days’ worth of work.

Cloë Stambridge [59:25]: Yeah, it’s incredible. I mean, I have Claude open constantly. I’m not a Claude Code user yet — I’ll get there someday — but I think Cowork is exceptional, in terms of writing skills, even having a skill to pull the feedback together.

James MacDonald [59:42]: Top three skills?

Cloë Stambridge [59:44]: That I use. The number one is the feedback one.

James MacDonald [59:48]: And that’s feedback for a candidate post an interview, to say, hey, based on your interview?

Cloë Stambridge [59:52]: So this is — sorry — pulling up the feedback from our call to share it with the hiring manager, to make a recommendation whether we should proceed or not. I have also used — I guess it’s not a skill — but have also used it to screen candidates for me, feeding it really well with conversations I’ve had with the founder, with exactly what we’re looking for. And then it just goes into my ATS and will actually screen, go through and say, these are the top five candidates, put these on pause, and you probably don’t need to deal with the rest. That has been such a lifesaver and such a time saver.

The third one — I don’t actually use it for emails or a lot of content writing, because I don’t write a lot of content, but I prefer having that human element. I still don’t think that that’s a solid replacement for that, because I’m a relationship builder. That’s partially a big chunk of how I do that.

What’s one of your favourite skills?

James MacDonald [1:00:45]: One I’ve been able to achieve — a skill which is just my morning. The morning comes and hits me on Slack. Here’s your top three emails that are sitting in your inbox that you haven’t replied to. Here’s your top three projects that are slipping at the moment. Here’s your top five things — out of the 68,000 newsletters I’ve subscribed to, they all go in the inbox, it scrolls all of them, here’s the top five things you need to know out of all of them. And I’ve got one more, that is a different folder within my inbox, which is based on AI and recruitment strategies. It says, here are three things at the moment which might change your overall strategy, current strategy around that.

Cloë Stambridge [1:01:24]: A little daily.

James MacDonald [1:01:26]: It’s because I’m not organised, is why I built it. It’s like, here are the things that are missing that you need to catch up on. And it also just hits my diary, and it’s like, here are your three things on today, you’ve got three meetings booked at the same time, at the moment you’re meant to be in Sydney and Newcastle at the same time, you’re going to have to cancel one of them.

Cloë Stambridge [1:01:43]: Yeah — do the podcast.

James MacDonald [1:01:45]: So that’s been the biggest win for me, just from an organisational perspective — multiple moving parts, and just being like, hey, cramming my brain up for the morning. It helps me out.

Cloë Stambridge [1:01:57]: Yeah, that’s awesome.

James MacDonald [1:01:58]: Appreciate your time today.

Cloë Stambridge [1:01:59]: My pleasure.

James MacDonald [1:01:59]: Thank you for sharing the story of inside AirTree, SafetyCulture before that, Lab 17. It’s great to hear how to build teams in the age of AI.

Cloë Stambridge [1:02:08]: Awesome. Thank you.

James MacDonald [1:02:11]: That’s the episode — Cloë Stambridge, talent lead at AirTree. Here’s my take. Cloë said early stage companies hire people and talent too late, and she’s right. And it is a challenge, because there’s a money runway thing, but those first 10 hires can decide the company’s trajectory. And whoever’s running your hiring, outside of marketing, actually has the most impact on your brand in the market.

Most founders run these hires just based on vibes, but they pay for it when they go through scale. So I think most people should steal what Cloë’s recommended — hire for values, not just for ticking skills boxes, and be able to tell the story of your team and why people should come and join you. No matter the company size, team size — what does your brand look like, why should people come and join you? Deliberate processes create consistency. Setting up these hiring practices from the start can help companies go through scale. That’s the game.

So if you’ve got something out of this episode, subscribe wherever you’re listening. I put out a newsletter every Tuesday, it’s available on Substack, Building Tech Teams. There’ll be a new episode next week, see you then.

This is the Building Tech Teams podcast. We release new episodes every Tuesday. Really keen for feedback on guests you’d like to see, more topics you’d like to see in depth. If you’d love to provide any form of feedback to me, find me on LinkedIn, forward slash James MacDonald AU. You won’t miss me. This episode was produced by Day One.