On Talent
Exceptional talent is the prerequisite for exceptional feats.
A small number of people can change the trajectory of a company, a field, an industry. They raise the ambition of everyone around them, attract other exceptional people, and make possible what previously seemed impossible.
The ability to recognize those people early, before their greatness is obvious to everyone else, is a superpower.
This is the belief that sits at the heart of Hummingbird.
We are initiating a Call for Talent.
You don’t have to come from recruiting to build incredible teams.
In the past few years, we’ve seen early talent leaders across our portfolio come from a range of backgrounds.
The first person to own talent at Lovable was an ex-consultant and a VC-backed founder.
The first person to oversee the team’s growth at microagi was a former investor.
We’ve seen cofounders step into this role because it was simply the most important thing they could be doing.
We view this as a fundamental shift in how talent is - and should be - valued.
We take the craft of talent seriously at Hummingbird. We believe it’s a function deserving of people who have an innate ability to read others; not as resumes and role-fits, but as whole humans. It’s a function deserving of people who instinctively know who needs to be in a room together to make something extraordinary happen.
Honing this innate ability and practicing the craft of talent gives you the opportunity to build incredible teams and leave your mark on some of the most influential companies of our time.
Whether you are an engineer, a chief of staff, a consultant, an investor, or already working deep in talent, if this resonates with you, we encourage you to take a look at the two paths below.
Two paths, one application. Apply here. We look forward to hearing from you.
Hummingbird’s talent team is growing. This is a role for generalists. We are specifically looking for people who are early in their career and want to be working closely with founders, honing their lens on talent, and building incredible teams.
What we do
When Hummingbird decides to invest, we are investing in a founder. Because we know that without an exceptional founder, you can’t build an exceptional team. And without an exceptional team, you can’t build an exceptional company.
At Hummingbird, the investors focus on finding legendary founders. Talent focuses on building legendary teams.
The talent team’s mission is to seek out people we believe are true outliers; people with unconventional paths, people who have gotten where they are despite the odds, people who don’t fit into a neat box. These could be operators and builders. They could be future founders. They could be future investors.
When we find someone special, we keep them close. We understand who they are, what they care about, and what they are capable of. And when we see an incredible fit for something in the portfolio, they are the first to hear about it.
We introduced five of the first early hires at Lovable.
We hired more than 10 of the early team members in the first year of microagi.
We made some of the most consequential hires at Anima.
Incredible people will come out of these teams and go on to build entirely new companies and ecosystems.
In the end, everything is fueled by talent. That’s what we do, that’s why our team exists.
You might be a fit if you are
- 01A natural generalist. You’re drawn to breadth. You move swiftly between projects and context-switching comes easily to you.
- 02Deeply curious. You go down rabbit holes. You get dangerously smart on new topics, fast.
- 03Discerning. You have always known yourself to have strong taste and judgement. You are deliberate about with whom, how, and where you spend your time and energy.
- 04People-obsessed. You think people are the most interesting thing in the world. You lead with curiosity when meeting someone new. You have a knack for getting people to open up to you. People often walk away from conversations with you feeling like they learned something new about themselves.
- 05Gritty and driven. You understand that gritty work is not only necessary, it’s what makes you great at what you do. You take pride in doing hard things and doing them well.
More than anything, we want people who have incredibly high expectations of themselves. This role can take many shapes. It’s exhilarating, stimulating and challenging. You won’t be micro-managed; instead, you’ll be owning your own relationships, projects and initiatives, and you’ll be accountable for bringing excellence to everything you do.
If this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you.
Maintaining talent density as a team scales is one of the hardest challenges in company building. But it’s easily the most important.
The founders we back are obsessive about the people they build with. The talent function sits at the heart of the company, working alongside founders and early operators to find the people who will shape what the company becomes.
Across the portfolio, that could mean building teams working on chips, AI safety, fintech, energy, consumer AI, or something entirely new. Different problems, same challenge: find exceptional people, convince them to take the leap, and keep the bar exceptionally high as you scale.
Once you’ve done it, it’s a muscle you’ll carry with you. Whether you become a founder, investor, or leader, knowing how to recognize exceptional people and build formidable teams is an edge.
If you want to practice the craft of talent in one of the highest-intensity environments you can find, come build with one of our companies.