Alexandr Wang: “Hire people who give a shit”

June 20, 2025

The ScaleAI founder is asked for the best advice he has for founders, to which he responds:

“The biggest thing is you have to really, really care.”

Alex explains this is also the number one trait he looks for in people he hires:

“When you interview and interact with people, you can tell who phones it in and whose work is so incredibly important to them that it eats at them if they don’t do great work. One of the greatest indicators of how much I enjoyed working with people and how successful they were at Scale was just the degree to which their soul is invested in the work they do.”

It’s important that the CEO lives this principle too.

“I still review every hire at the company,” Alex says. “I care immensely. I work with all these people who care immensely. And that lets us feel much more deeply what happens in the business, so we learn more quickly and adapt more quickly, and I think that’s been quite important to the success that we’ve had.”

One of Scale AI’s values is that “quality is fractal.”

“High standards trickle down within an organization,” Alex explains. “Most of the time when people realize their manager or their manager’s manager doesn’t really care, that removes the desire for them to care. So it’s incredibly important that high standards and care for quality is a deeply embedded tenet of the entire organization.”