Writings
The Talent Machine
The Talent
Machine
December 11, 2025
Our Philosophy on Talent
Our Philosophy on Talent
At Augusta Labs, if there is one idea we take the most seriously, it's the following:
The team you build is the company you build.
If you accept this, then hiring logically becomes the highest leverage action inside the company. It is not “a function.” It is the central act of company creation. And if the company is the byproduct of who we bring into the room, then we must be relentless, obsessive, and unreasonable about the standard of people we let in.
As such, we are not trying to assemble a balanced team of general contributors. We are building a concentrated cluster of outliers: people who are sharp, ambitious, very high-agency and often weird or interesting in non-obvious ways (because that is fun). We are searching for individuals who would eventually do something great by themselves - and then pulling them into an environment where their slope massively accelerates.
This strategy only works if we truly believe we can become the gravitational center for the best young minds in a specific pocket of talent. And we do. In fact, we believe we are uniquely positioned to monopolize the sharpest and most ambitious young talent across an entire country, Portugal, because:
Almost nobody else is competing for these people at all - the Portuguese market systematically undervalues ambition, speed, and technical intensity, which pushes exceptional people away rather than pulling them in.
There is no other tech company in Portugal that is simultaneously small, intense, founder-led, AI-native, and doing serious, momentum-backed work - the exact environment where outliers want to grow.
We must fundamentally be - and already are becoming - the single best answer to the question:
“If I’m a young, ambitious, sharp person in Portugal and I want to work seriously in AI, surrounded by people I deeply respect, where should I go?”
This playbook is not new.
Bending Spoons did it in Italy.
UiPath did it in Romania.
EnduroSat did it in Bulgaria.
… the list goes on.
And Augusta Labs must do it in Portugal.
We actually think this probably is a very smart investment thesis across Europe: simply look into subscale countries, spot the company that captures the inflow of the top young minds, and bet on it. Backing these companies early seems like one of the highest-ROI bets a European investor can make.
At Augusta Labs, if there is one idea we take the most seriously, it's the following:
The team you build is the company you build.
If you accept this, then hiring logically becomes the highest leverage action inside the company. It is not “a function.” It is the central act of company creation. And if the company is the byproduct of who we bring into the room, then we must be relentless, obsessive, and unreasonable about the standard of people we let in.
As such, we are not trying to assemble a balanced team of general contributors. We are building a concentrated cluster of outliers: people who are sharp, ambitious, very high-agency and often weird or interesting in non-obvious ways (because that is fun). We are searching for individuals who would eventually do something great by themselves - and then pulling them into an environment where their slope massively accelerates.
This strategy only works if we truly believe we can become the gravitational center for the best young minds in a specific pocket of talent. And we do. In fact, we believe we are uniquely positioned to monopolize the sharpest and most ambitious young talent across an entire country, Portugal, because:
Almost nobody else is competing for these people at all - the Portuguese market systematically undervalues ambition, speed, and technical intensity, which pushes exceptional people away rather than pulling them in.
There is no other tech company in Portugal that is simultaneously small, intense, founder-led, AI-native, and doing serious, momentum-backed work - the exact environment where outliers want to grow.
We must fundamentally be - and already are becoming - the single best answer to the question:
“If I’m a young, ambitious, sharp person in Portugal and I want to work seriously in AI, surrounded by people I deeply respect, where should I go?”
This playbook is not new.
Bending Spoons did it in Italy.
UiPath did it in Romania.
EnduroSat did it in Bulgaria.
… the list goes on.
And Augusta Labs must do it in Portugal.
We actually think this probably is a very smart investment thesis across Europe: simply look into subscale countries, spot the company that captures the inflow of the top young minds, and bet on it. Backing these companies early seems like one of the highest-ROI bets a European investor can make.
How We Spot Outliers
How We Spot Outliers
Our talent spotting approach follows 2 simple principles:
Top-tier talent is hired when found, not when needed.
And if we want outliers, we must look where other people don’t.
Most exceptional individuals never enter a traditional hiring pipeline. They reveal themselves through strange, obscure signals on the internet that showcase ambition, curiosity, agency, or taste. So our sourcing system is built around finding these anomalies.
One example: we manually scan every Portuguese person on YC’s Co-Founder Match. Anyone from Portugal actively trying to start a company is already in the top 0.1% of initiative-takers. If they show even a hint of promise, we reach out immediately.
Another example: we track obscure digital signals that no recruiter would ever consider. As an example, we identified all Portuguese university students who follow George Hotz (a cracked, 1000x engineer that is sufficiently public), a near-perfect proxy for curiosity, contrarian interest, and technical appetite. Then we reached out to all of them. Then we hired one of them.
And many more.
In short: traditional recruiting optimizes for ease; we optimize for discovering people before anyone else even realizes they exist.
Our talent spotting approach follows 2 simple principles:
Top-tier talent is hired when found, not when needed.
And if we want outliers, we must look where other people don’t.
Most exceptional individuals never enter a traditional hiring pipeline. They reveal themselves through strange, obscure signals on the internet that showcase ambition, curiosity, agency, or taste. So our sourcing system is built around finding these anomalies.
One example: we manually scan every Portuguese person on YC’s Co-Founder Match. Anyone from Portugal actively trying to start a company is already in the top 0.1% of initiative-takers. If they show even a hint of promise, we reach out immediately.
Another example: we track obscure digital signals that no recruiter would ever consider. As an example, we identified all Portuguese university students who follow George Hotz (a cracked, 1000x engineer that is sufficiently public), a near-perfect proxy for curiosity, contrarian interest, and technical appetite. Then we reached out to all of them. Then we hired one of them.
And many more.
In short: traditional recruiting optimizes for ease; we optimize for discovering people before anyone else even realizes they exist.
How We Hire
How We Hire
Because we target a very specific kind of person, our hiring process is designed to surface exactly that archetype. Every step exists for a reason.
First, a culture test.
Not to evaluate charm or polish, but to understand how a person thinks, how they frame problems, how they respond to pressure, and whether they resonate with our values: agency, speed, aggressiveness, etc. We need to know whether this is someone who raises the average or lowers it. If the fit is unclear, we stop, because as the great saying goes: “If there is doubt, then there is no doubt”.
Then comes the learning challenge.
Candidates are given a real, unstructured problem and asked to produce a working solution in 48-72 hours. We don’t test what they already know; we test how quickly they learn something they have never done before. This step evaluates slope:
Can they teach themselves new domains rapidly?
Can they execute under ambiguity?
Do they show taste in how they structure solutions?
Do they persist when the problem slaps them in the face?
This challenge reliably separates the extraordinary from the merely competent and apparently aligned.
Next, we bring candidates to our office to review the challenge.
This is where we see how they think in real time - how they handle critique, how they defend their reasoning, how they react to new constraints. It is also where they see how we work and how our vibes are at the office. If they get it and get magnetically attracted to that environment, then that is a great sign.
If all signals align, we hire, doing whatever it takes. To the point where we’ve never not hired someone that we wanted to join the company.
Because we target a very specific kind of person, our hiring process is designed to surface exactly that archetype. Every step exists for a reason.
First, a culture test.
Not to evaluate charm or polish, but to understand how a person thinks, how they frame problems, how they respond to pressure, and whether they resonate with our values: agency, speed, aggressiveness, etc. We need to know whether this is someone who raises the average or lowers it. If the fit is unclear, we stop, because as the great saying goes: “If there is doubt, then there is no doubt”.
Then comes the learning challenge.
Candidates are given a real, unstructured problem and asked to produce a working solution in 48-72 hours. We don’t test what they already know; we test how quickly they learn something they have never done before. This step evaluates slope:
Can they teach themselves new domains rapidly?
Can they execute under ambiguity?
Do they show taste in how they structure solutions?
Do they persist when the problem slaps them in the face?
This challenge reliably separates the extraordinary from the merely competent and apparently aligned.
Next, we bring candidates to our office to review the challenge.
This is where we see how they think in real time - how they handle critique, how they defend their reasoning, how they react to new constraints. It is also where they see how we work and how our vibes are at the office. If they get it and get magnetically attracted to that environment, then that is a great sign.
If all signals align, we hire, doing whatever it takes. To the point where we’ve never not hired someone that we wanted to join the company.
How We Grow Talent
How We Grow Talent
Once someone joins, the environment itself becomes the teacher. There are basically no management layers and our development model is brutally simple:
Give people extreme responsibility before they feel ready for it, and watch them grow at 10× speed in order to meet it:
We throw people into the deep end.
They work on critical, high-stakes problems inside very large companies.
They get massive B2B exposure across industries and Fortune 500 enterprises.
They operate as the mini-CEO of their project.
They own the quality, the client, the output, and the consequences.
We do not micromanage - because agency is a prerequisite, not an earned privilege.
Feedback is given on the spot, with egos set aside (as much as possible).
And responsibility and reward grow together as tightly as possible (no yearly comp reviews, etc.).
The result is that people grow here at speeds that are bluntly unachievable in a corporate standard. Work that would take five years to master elsewhere happens in five months here. Something that is extremely important in a space as nascent as (generative) AI, where basically everyone, even the most "senior people" in the world, has little to no experience in this space.
And lastly, this environment either produces founders or it spits them out. It cannot produce anything else.
Once someone joins, the environment itself becomes the teacher. There are basically no management layers and our development model is brutally simple:
Give people extreme responsibility before they feel ready for it, and watch them grow at 10× speed in order to meet it:
We throw people into the deep end.
They work on critical, high-stakes problems inside very large companies.
They get massive B2B exposure across industries and Fortune 500 enterprises.
They operate as the mini-CEO of their project.
They own the quality, the client, the output, and the consequences.
We do not micromanage - because agency is a prerequisite, not an earned privilege.
Feedback is given on the spot, with egos set aside (as much as possible).
And responsibility and reward grow together as tightly as possible (no yearly comp reviews, etc.).
The result is that people grow here at speeds that are bluntly unachievable in a corporate standard. Work that would take five years to master elsewhere happens in five months here. Something that is extremely important in a space as nascent as (generative) AI, where basically everyone, even the most "senior people" in the world, has little to no experience in this space.
And lastly, this environment either produces founders or it spits them out. It cannot produce anything else.
The Emergent Effects
The Emergent Effects
When you assemble a group of sharp, ambitious, high-agency individuals and place them in an environment that demands responsibility and rewards speed, a set of powerful emergent dynamics appears - ones we could never engineer directly.
Talent begins to auto-select.
People who cannot keep pace remove themselves; those who thrive attract others like them.
The average quality of the team rises on its own.
Every exceptional new hire increases the gravitational pull of the company.
People progress at unprecedented speeds.
Learning curves compress; agency compounds.
Recruiting accelerates.
The best people introduce the best people; our funnel becomes more precise with each cycle. And even people that run through our process then end up referring other people they think could be interesting.
Teams self-govern.
High-ownership groups require little management; work becomes distributed and parallelized.
Mini-companies emerge within Augusta.
Individuals start running initiatives as if they were their own startups.
These emergent properties are not side effects - they are the engine of Augusta Labs. They are the reason we can build faster, learn faster, and pull away from competitors without them understanding why.
This filtering is one of the strongest protective dynamics of Augusta Labs. And the strongest proof that this system works is simple:
Augusta Labs has grown into a 30+ person organization while fully preserving - and in many ways raising - the talent bar we started with; where most companies see quality decay as they scale (let's see if we get there one day).
When you assemble a group of sharp, ambitious, high-agency individuals and place them in an environment that demands responsibility and rewards speed, a set of powerful emergent dynamics appears - ones we could never engineer directly.
Talent begins to auto-select.
People who cannot keep pace remove themselves; those who thrive attract others like them.
The average quality of the team rises on its own.
Every exceptional new hire increases the gravitational pull of the company.
People progress at unprecedented speeds.
Learning curves compress; agency compounds.
Recruiting accelerates.
The best people introduce the best people; our funnel becomes more precise with each cycle. And even people that run through our process then end up referring other people they think could be interesting.
Teams self-govern.
High-ownership groups require little management; work becomes distributed and parallelized.
Mini-companies emerge within Augusta.
Individuals start running initiatives as if they were their own startups.
These emergent properties are not side effects - they are the engine of Augusta Labs. They are the reason we can build faster, learn faster, and pull away from competitors without them understanding why.
This filtering is one of the strongest protective dynamics of Augusta Labs. And the strongest proof that this system works is simple:
Augusta Labs has grown into a 30+ person organization while fully preserving - and in many ways raising - the talent bar we started with; where most companies see quality decay as they scale (let's see if we get there one day).
Closing
Closing
Augusta Labs is fundamentally a talent machine.
We identify outliers before anyone else, recruit them with conviction, and immerse them in environments where they are forced to grow at extraordinary speed. The company compounds because the people compound.
This memo is not a description of what we aspire to.
It is an articulation of what we already are - and what we must continue to become. And if you want to be part of it, just reach out. There is plenty to do.
We’re just getting started.
Augusta Labs is fundamentally a talent machine.
We identify outliers before anyone else, recruit them with conviction, and immerse them in environments where they are forced to grow at extraordinary speed. The company compounds because the people compound.
This memo is not a description of what we aspire to.
It is an articulation of what we already are - and what we must continue to become. And if you want to be part of it, just reach out. There is plenty to do.
We’re just getting started.
Enter the Intelligence Age.
Enter the Intelligence Age.