TALENT

You have to invest in the intellectual capital of the firm. That is your competitive advantage. Everything else can be replicated.

I don't hire economists. I hire physicists and mathematicians. Economists know too many theories. Scientists know how to find what is actually true.

The best thing I ever did was hire people smarter than me and get out of their way.

We try to hire people who are smart enough and creative enough to find things that nobody else has found.

The most important thing I've learned is that the quality of the people you work with is the most important variable in your success.

I'm Canadian. Nick is Canadian. We built Cohere in Toronto. Everyone assumed we'd move to San Francisco. We didn't. Toronto has the talent. The Valley has the hype. We chose talent.

We open-sourced most of our trading technology. People thought we were crazy. But open source attracted the best developers in India to work with us, and that talent is worth more than any proprietary code.

Nigeria has more software developers than most people think. The talent was always here. The opportunity was not.

We just want to have great people working for us.

The globalization of talent is permanent. Companies that don't hire globally will lose to those that do.

Talent without work ethic is nothing. I was never the most gifted — I was the hardest working.

A luxury brand is only as strong as its creative director. Choose wisely.

AI talent is the scarcest resource in the world. Finding it early is the highest-leverage activity.

Turkey has world-class game development talent at a fraction of San Francisco salaries. That's our edge.

The Eagles were nobodies when I signed them. Guns N' Roses were a mess. Nirvana was underground. I back artists, not sure things.

I don't hire one genius. I hire 50 geniuses and let them each do their thing. Diversification through different minds.

Europe has the engineering talent. What it lacked was the venture ecosystem. Atomico exists to fix that.

Investing is a people business disguised as a numbers business. Get the people right and the numbers follow.

The companies that treat recruiting like a strategic function instead of an administrative one will win the talent war every time.

Democratizing access to opportunity is not charity. It is good business. Companies that only recruit from 20 schools are leaving 95 percent of the talent pool on the table.

Barcelona gave us three things Silicon Valley couldn't: multilingual talent, lower costs, and a reminder that business travel is a global problem, not an American one.

Build in India, sell to the world. The engineering talent here is as good as anywhere on Earth.

Cristiano Ronaldo is the best player in the world. Bringing him to Juventus is a statement of who we are and where we want to go.

When you have the best players, you win. It is pretty simple.

My insight is that entrepreneurs are 80 per cent trained and 20 per cent born with it.