A little story about a CEO, a $2.5B pile of cash, and a College Student
I’d like to tell you a story about a guy named Dick Costolo.
You might’ve heard of him because he was the CEO of Twitter.
Here’s what he said in a recent interview …
I remember when I was at Twitter in 2012, there was a senior at Princeton who was an amazing engineer. Really, one of the stars. She had done an off-the-charts initial phone interview with us, so we prioritized getting her into the pipeline right away. And the way it works, whenever there was someone that great on the radar, I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to get on the phone, and sell her myself. The CEO, OK? Getting her was that vital.
Well, I spoke to her. She was extremely polite and gracious and thankful, and repeatedly referred to me as ‘Mr. Costolo.’ But it became clear as we talked that she had actually had several conversations with CEOs from other big tech companies. I was just one CEO conversation of many. And I thought, “Wow, that’s where we are.” That’s how ferocious the competition has become for the best engineers. Incidentally, we didn’t get her.
At that time Twitter had $2,500,000,000 dollars of cash. That’s Billion, not Million.
Their CEO is on the phone with college students, trying to recruit talent.
And they still lost the talent war.
If a Goliath like Twitter can’t win, how can any of us win?
The only way to win the war on talent is to fight on another battlefield, where you can actually win. I’ll be writing more about this in the future. Stay tuned.
