Starting From Scratch

Along with world-class skills and a problem-solver’s mindset, we were looking for people to join Rivian who could in turn attract more talent. Building a car takes a massive number of people across many disciplines, so we needed to open as many hiring channels as we could. The first 20 hires were extremely difficult, but many of them brought in the next five or 10 talented people from their networks, and many of them stayed at Rivian for years. They were in it for the right reasons, and their fingerprints are all over the brand today.

After I moved to the Bay Area, we rented a tiny space in San Mateo, and I hired four or five people from my network, mostly former colleagues from my consulting days. Other than that, it was completely new territory. I drove up and down the 101 every day, meeting as many people as I could while absorbing as much information as I could about Silicon Valley. Those early conversations and learnings would end up becoming the guiding principles of my hiring thesis going forward: When you have nothing else but a vision to sell, you figure out what it takes to draw the right talent in a brutally competitive hiring market.

Recruiting was only part of the job. Between 2016 and 2018, we were also defining the product as the vehicle designs were coming together. On top of finding the rare talent in the software hotbed of Silicon Valley who were willing to take a chance at an unknown car company, we had to figure out what would win over customers. A normal day meant meeting with seven or eight candidates. Then I would likely take a redeye to Detroit, Chicago, or New York to pitch potential suppliers, manufacturers, and investors, then fly right back to California the same day and do it all over again. It was physically punishing, but very fulfilling, and it taught me a lot.

How do you pitch the story of a product that doesn’t have any existing proof points? You could go one of many ways: You can talk in excruciating details on the underlying technology, or focus on the brand and the resulting customer experience, or go into the business model differentiation. My big learning was that you had to tailor your pitch to the candidate’s profile and personality. It took us a while to sharpen our answer: We were taking a clean-sheet, first principles approach, building the entire stack in-house and creating an entirely new customer experience — one rooted in discovery, adventure, and a consciousness for the future.

That pitch did a lot of heavy lifting for us. First, building a car is so complex that you can count comparable engineering challenges on one hand. That could be a massive hiring deterrent — or a natural filter, however you want to look at it. Second, not all car enthusiasts were bought in on our vertically integrated approach. Finally, going direct to consumer requires us to build out an entire go to market infrastructure, which was a paradigm shift in the business model of car sales and service. Again, this was unfamiliar, and unchartered territory. When all these filters are layered together, what you are left with is a rare combination of people that are unafraid of working with ambiguity, taking on unprecedented business, and engineering challenges.

Later stage companies always have a framework by which they recruit and interview candidates — and they absolutely should — but when you are brand new, you don’t want to be too rigid in how you go about finding the people who will become your foundational team.

At Rivian, we deliberately did not have a rigid hiring process. Our playbook’s top feature was speed, plus a strongly aligned founding team with a commitment to empower each early employee with the right tools. They weren’t just going to be just another cog in the wheel; they had a real chance at being a linchpin in their own space.

We used a very simple way to accomplish this. During one of those early 2016 midnight strategy sessions, RJ and I penned down a list of guiding principles on a clean white sheet. These would iterate over the years and morph into Rivian’s “Cultural Handbook”, which serves as the ultimate behavioral guardrail and strategic guide for every employee that ever joined the company.

This approach carried through beyond recruiting and interviewing. Even as we were actively building the team, product, supplier relationships, manufacturing infrastructure, and potential customer pipeline, we still had weekly all-hands meetings where RJ would talk about Rivian’s North Star. New people were joining constantly, and we did not want anybody to miss out on hearing it. It had to be personal and direct, not a recording, and repeating it was productive, not wasteful. Rivian’s culture is why the brand and its voice are unique, and it was built through small, deliberate actions like this.

As a Partner at Eclipse, I work with founders at the earliest stages of their big ideas. Many of the lessons from the earliest stages of Rivian come up in almost every conversation. Here are my top three pieces of advice:

Stay close to hiring: When a founder tells me they want to outsource recruiting, I always push back. (quick anecdote?)

Move fast on mistakes: Nobody is perfect. Every founder or their founding team gets a hire wrong. The difference is how long it takes you to recognize your mistake and act.

Repeat the vision: I hear all the time that founders have explained their vision enough. Maybe it’s written everywhere on their website, recruiting materials, and the walls of their office. That’s not enough. They need to hear it from you.

Every founding story is different, but the things that matter most at the start are the same: Get the right people and make sure they are there for the right reasons.

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