Hiring has traditionally been a treasure hunt for expertise. Companies wanted the tried and true. We have spent many years working to help founders find the marketing leaders and doers who had scaled the chosen channels and could speak to their identified playbooks. We searched for the product leaders who had launched products in the same categories to great success, the engineering leaders who had built teams and written code in the language, the growth hackers with portfolios of proof points that matched the maps they were drawing. The logic was that past success in the same terrain was the surest predictor of future wins.

But now we’re in a time where maps are being tossed aside in favor of running straight into new territory, rapidly testing the tools that can help as we go. In a world where channels, tools, and tactics shift at warp speed, playbooks quickly become worthless. 

The winning hire today isn’t the one who has done it before but, instead, the person who can figure it out first and fast. We are seeing a dramatic shift in what the best founders are looking for when we talk through key hires. Instead of prioritizing experience, the focus is on horsepower, hunger, and speed: the tinkerers who dive into new tools before the documentation is written, the marketers who sense a cultural shift and ride it, the builders who will ship fast and furiously. 

This shift has made hiring fuzzier. The old “find the expert” filters no longer work when the expertise you need today didn’t exist six months ago. For founders, the aperture has widened dramatically. You can now hire from unexpected backgrounds, across geographies, and from industries that don’t yet realize they’re relevant. For candidates, that uncertainty can be unsettling; the ladder rungs are less defined, and the value of “years of experience” feels less solid. But its also freeing and exciting, an opportunity to rethink about what skills mean and where you want to focus time and energy as the landscape shifts. If you want to be a leading marketer in this AI age, your lack of experience owning SEO or Facebook ad channels doesn't matter. Prove you are fast and fluent on every new tool hitting the market and have a point of view on breaking through the noise as the speakers and amps are being built real time.

Underlying this change is a deeper shift in where knowledge lives. Increasingly, it’s moving from our heads into large models and the tools they power. Access is no longer the constraint; execution speed and creativity are the new moats. There will no doubt be new playbooks, built over time. But while we are map-less and navigating all new terrain with fury and excitement, we need the people who have big imaginations, ceaseless determination to keep trying, quick turns, and lots of desire to dive headfirst into the newest opportunities.