The most important hiring filter for growth roles is whether a candidate is a systems thinker who can deconstruct their job into a map of inputs, outputs, automatable tasks, and feedback loops—not whether they have deep channel expertise.
Matt argues that hyper-specialists are dying out and that the best growth hires are AI-native systems thinkers who can step back from any task, map the moving pieces of their role, identify where agents or automation fit, and build self-improving workflows—fewer than 1% of candidates pass this bar. ✦ AI generated
Matt Swulinski · 20VC · 2026-08-15 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 54:59
“How has what you look for in talent changed in the last year or two?”
I'm looking for that. But they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will out compete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native... To me that's being able to step back from let's say a task that is a part of my job being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say in my role what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis what are the inter relationships, where's the boring admin, where's the reporting, what's all of that. And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job.
verbatim transcript · starts at 54:59
54:59in let's say meta ads. They've scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars and they're, let's say, the best in the world as a meta ads media buyer. And that would be the main thing I'd be looking for. Let's say that's the person I'm hiring. Now, I'm looking for that. But they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker
55:21and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will out compete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native. And it's like I'm seeing that happen where like I'm going to have a hot take here. I think um a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native and they're failing. >> Why are they failing? the people that are in those roles are
55:44not systems thinkers where like if you're in a marketing or let's say ops role and you're not a systems thinker you don't know you actually don't know >> how do you think about like what does a systems thinker mean >> so to me that's being able to step back from let's say a task that is a part of my job being able to take one degree of
56:03separation from the task itself and say in my role what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis what are the inter relationships, where's the boring admin, where's the reporting, what's all of that. And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent
56:23or AI to this part and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job, right? And a lot of people go and go to chat GPT and ask it a question and then they go on still doing their job the manual way, right? And if you take a step back and say, "What would it take for me to fully automate, let's say, all of my job, and of course it's not going
56:45to work. Things are going to break apart." But run yourself through that thought experiment. And the thing is is if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job. And because they're not systems thinkers, they they don't actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. Uh so that that's the line for me. So like when I when I