Ali Yousaf

All that really matters in recruiting is that you hire the right person at the right time in the right role.

Experiences in the last 12 months that made Clarke's Third Law feel real: first Waymo ride, FSD, and Starlink.

LFG! Also, if you seriously want to do something that will have outsized impact on all of humanity, please DM me and join us in bringing fusion to the world!

@staysaasy @mntruell Getting comfortable with cold outreach and rejection is a superpower!

What I love the most about these "omg I missed out on $500m because I didn't respond to Cursor" posts: People are falling out of the woodwork posting DMs from @mntruell where he's asking for help and/or trying to recruit people to a miniscule startup called Cursor. In every screenshot the dude is polite and reasonable, but more importantly he's sitting at MIT, or I guess some random apt in SF after he drops out, and just really really really really really trying to make his totally unknown startup work. So he DMs what appears to be the entire tech community (not me but it's ok I'm not mad) trying to hustle and get stuff done. Big fancy MIT brain, could probably be doing quant trading or big tech and making bank somewhere (although not $60b!), and instead he's at his startup sending cold emails like he's a Salesforce SDR who just graduated from ASU with a dual degree in waterpolo and beer pong. Cold outreach sucks. I once sent 120 straight recruiting emails (in fact, trying to recruit MIT students from campus recruiting) and got exactly 0 responses. It's a gloriously pure form of rejection. So many people, especially ones with fancy credentials, refuse to do this sort of thing. So anyway, I really respect the humility and drive, and I hope that he spends his share of the $60b on something awesome.

@Dkirtley First to fusion!

Two licenses and one massive milestone! Today Helion received two licenses from the Washington State Department of Health for our Orion facility in Malaga, WA, making us the first company in the world to secure the regulatory licenses needed for a fusion power plant.

@joulee 🐐

The people who succeed in fusion are part dreamer, part doer. Dreamers of a better world, with the grit to make it happen.

@chamath - did you always know it would be @elonmusk ?

Occasionally I'll speak at new hire orientation. Today was one of those days, and being one of the first people our new hires hear from on day 1 is a huge honor! What always strikes me: these folks could work anywhere. They chose @Helion_Energy and our mission. Let's go!!

Have scaled quite a bit in a year. But still so much work to do!

@Jessie0Barton crushing it!

big money big money big money helionenergy.com/newsroom/helio…

Favorite thing about today: we spent some time celebrating the fundraise but most of my day was then spent on how do we hire more exceptional people faster and how do we enable our employees to do their best work? The focus on the mission is insane at @Helion_Energy!! Join us!!

@ItsElanaGold And @Helion_Energy x.com/i/status/20625…

The rounds that closed this week are insane... - Impulse Space. $500M Series D - Lassie. $35M Series A - Layup Parts. $42M Series A - Westmag. $11M Seed (a16z led) - Special. Emerged from stealth (a16z led) Capital is pouring into the next generation of American infrastructure.

Today, we closed our Series G at @Helion_Energy , raising $465M to build the industrial and manufacturing foundation needed to produce fusion generators at an assembly-line scale.

My favorite question to ask: what's the hardest thing you've ever worked on? Then spend 15–20 min going deep. With one follow-up: how would you solve it with half the time? Shows what they define as hard, how they think, and signals whether they can compress timelines.

🌭

@awerhun @Shopify I've always pushed to structure comp so that you are paid the same at each level, regardless of IC/M track. Don't want our best ICs feeling like they have to move to management role to get paid more. Curious to know if you think there's even more that can be done here?

What's important here for People teams is to look at your comp plans and make sure it supports a high velocity IC. @Shopify was ahead of the curve on this fixing this years ago - where you could get shares being a manager and also if you chose to be of a certain high level IC. They knew that not everyone aspires to be on the leadership track, and they had to comp appropriately. Check in that your ESOP / comp structure aligns with this new reality. Teams are flattening.

@nikunj @yacineMTB Fwiw no complaints with the cost - very cool product!

@cbatalent @yacineMTB It's there on the landing page! I can make it in the hero to make it even more evident. Also selling it at cost since it costs me $8-$9/report fwiw since it does insane amount of tool calling + web search.

is anyone vibecoding making actual cool stuff or is it still all mostly slop

@nikunj @yacineMTB Family home finder is cool but wish it stated upfront that report costs $9.99!

Built a bunch of fun, some useful things.. - familyhomefinder.com (helps families find a home) - prompttochip.com (explains the entire stack when you prompt an LLM) - deploygraph.com (what do companies use as their stack) - wrap2025.com (iMessage wrapped) Plenty more!

@signulll Workplace was so good. Actually, most of the tools FB built internally to support their teams are better than the ones companies pay millions of dollars for!

facebook once had a product called workplace. it was basically facebook’s slack competitor, & it was actually really good. but it failed & got shut down. the problem wasn’t resources. facebook had infinite distribution, talent, infra, brand awareness, etc. the problem was perception. people understood facebook as a place to hang out, post photos, scroll, message friends, & participate in social life. they did not understand it as a place to do work. the product may have been good, but the cultural meaning of the brand fought the use case. chatgpt may face a version of this. openai can absolutely execute the product transition from chatbot to agent. the team is obviously talented enough. but the harder challenge is moving user perception from “this is where i ask ai questions” to “this is where i connect my calendar, email, files, finances, photos, workflows, preferences, & let it actually do things for me.” that is a very different psychological contract. the agentic era asks users to move from prompting a tool to delegating parts of their life. & that means the interface is only half the problem. the other half is narrative, packaging, permissioning, & making the transition feel inevitable instead of creepy. it’ll be interesting to see if ppl wanna connect stuff to chatgpt? it makes sense for codex for work etc. maybe. also most of agent stuff is productivity related today, & normal ppl outside of work don’t optimize for productivity, they want to feel stuff, delight, entertainment, etc. that’s also a very diff product too. 800m users is a gift but also transitioning ppl is hard as fuck esp when you have metrics to not tank & esp now that there are ads.

@ItsElanaGold This is the reason why finding and hiring a top tier recruiter can have an outsized impact on a company's trajectory!

Hiring is by far the hardest part of building a startup. No one warns you about this one. It makes or breaks everything.