Your first talent pool is just raccoons and hyenas

Your First Talent Pool Is Just Raccoons and Hyenas

In year one of a category-defining startup, your first talent pool is raccoons and hyenas. That is not a metaphor. That is the talent pipeline for a young startup.

Don't expect anyone normal to apply for your vacancies. Top talent, the creme de la creme, only comes if there is something worth coming to. It is a rite of passage every Founder has to go through. It is painful. And in our first year we had little to show for.

In my second venture, I learned you do not run one type of company. You run a series of completely different companies at different stages that happen to share a name.

Stage one: just you, an idea, some legal scaffolding, and a prayer. Stage two: different team, different tech stack, different product, different everything. Stage three: you're a car dealer salesperson with a pink tie and whitened teeth from Turkey.

You are basically the main character in a game who never gets to chill. Each stage unlocks new boss fights. New complexity. New costs. New catastrophes. While the arena keeps getting bigger. You start missing the early days when it was only about the scientific research.

Now you have to worry about the full product lifecycle, product-led growth (PLG) journey, marketing strategy, sales processes, legal, finance, and accountancy. Not to mention, the always present existential dread. That last one is not a department. But it takes up more of your calendar than any of the others.

You have just enough money to assemble something resembling a team. Not enough to hire a CFO. Not enough to hire a COO. So guess who becomes both? The Founder.

The person who was supposed to be doing product things is now doing every other job in the company.

If you are lucky, some amazing early-stage angels step in. They help with the operational, financial, and legal work. If you are not lucky, you learn it all yourself. At 2am. From YouTube. I have done both. YouTube is surprisingly good at copyright law. Less good at helping you sleep afterwards.

And on top of all of that? You deal with people. Their feelings. Their crises. Their needs. You become the therapist, the cheerleader, the strategist, and the asshole who fires them because they cannot do even one thing right. (#youonlyhadonefuckingjob).

I once gave a motivational speech at 10am. Restructured a research paper at noon. Fired someone at 3pm. And made Dutch pancakes for the team at 5pm. Because morale needed sugar more than my speeches.

That is the baseline. That is the job. Before you add the small matter of building a system that has never been built before. And we all know how Neurosymbolic AI is easy to build. Especially when it requires feeding from different fields of science. From persuasion sciences and propaganda to behavioural economics. Easiest thing in the world. (Sarcasm.)

Then, you learn that it is not actually the long hours and the deep work that make you tired. It is the constant context switching. And the realisation that the difference between a £10m company, a £100m, and a £1bn? The number of sequential right chess moves you make.

It is like growing up. You are a kid. You do stupid things all the time. You are teething as you grow. Bones ache as they get bigger. Nobody looks at a toddler and thinks ooh, he needs a bit of empathy. You just get a slap when you make the wrong move.

And boy did I need slaps.

Growing Pebbles Ai is exactly the same. I am back to being a toddler. Except the teething is 50+ engineering sprints and shipments to get to what resembles a product that is foundationally different.

And the growing pains are not just technical. They are compliance frameworks, GDPR, data protection across jurisdictions, and dealing with difficult customers with humility.

None of this makes the montage. The montage would bore the editor to death.

There are the people who watched Pumped and The Playlist and now think they understand startups. They saw the montage. The highs. The dramatic lows. The triumphant ending scored by an indie band.

What they did not see was the 1,000 days in between where nothing cinematic happened. Just a founder and a team working 15-hour days, 6 days a week. Grinding through complexity that would make a Hollywood screenwriter quit. Too boring to film.

Here are the questions you get in year 2.

"Why is it not scaling yet?" Because neurosymbolic AI is not a WordPress plugin.

"When will the product be ready?" When it is ready.

"Can you move faster?" We are already moving at a speed that would hospitalise most people.

"Have you considered pivoting?" Yes. Off a bridge. Briefly.

"What about your competitors? The ones wrapping GPT in a logo? They are great. My nephew builds apps. Want me to connect you?" Your nephew builds to-do lists in React. I am rewriting how AI reasons. But sure, connect us.

"What is your burn rate?" Higher than my patience in this meeting. Next question.

"Why is MRR not growing faster?" Because we were busy building the thing that generates MRR. I know. Radical concept.

"Hire a Sales Director to help you out." With what? My good looks? The budget is currently allocated to the minor detail of building the actual product they would be selling.

And my favourite. "Just do founder-led sales." Sure. And then founder-led support. And founder-led onboarding. And founder-led office hours. I got all the time in the world.

The trick is finding the right moment. Not too early. Not too late. With the right people. With the right foundation. With enough scar tissue to know the difference.

Figma, Monday and Notion took 5 to 6 years to crack PLG. Pebbles Ai is hellbent on doing this in Year 2 to 3. This game requires patience and persistence.

That is why often the best investors are entrepreneurs. They lived it and they know what the sexy montage skips. They understand that overnight success isn't real. It takes time to solve the PLG success formula. Instead of impatience, they show empathy and sympathy that fuels the heart, and strengthens the spine.

But even if you have amazing investors, which we do, as a Founder you still constantly fluctuate between highs and lows. If someone tells you they do not experience this, they are either lying or they are not pushing hard enough. Or they are a psychopath. In which case they are better off working in investment banking.

Eventually, if you survive long enough, you reach the part where the product is worth someone's money. That part is real. I have seen it happen. The hockey stick exists.

I wrote marketing strategies for early-stage Revolut before they became what they are today. There is a moment where everything clicks. The product, the timing, the team. One day it is survival. The next day it is a hockey stick. The threshold is real. You just need enough capital and enough willpower to still be standing when it arrives.

Besides, your investors backed a winner. They do not want a tearful voice note at midnight. They want the stoic founder. The one who keeps buggering on.

You send the yearly investor update. "Strong progress across all workstreams." Translation: I have aged six years in the last 12 months. The direction is forward. First revenue. Early PMF. Thank god. The hard work and the right moves are slowly paying off.

Though the compass is still broken and the map is on fire, at least the vibes are cautiously optimistic. And we are in it together. One Leonidas is now a 10-team strong Spartan squad. Two years ago it was Leonidas and a bunch of raccoons. I call this progress.

The technical isolation is something else.

We did not pick the easy path. It has never been done before. And when I say that, I do not mean "nobody has done it quite this way." I mean nobody has done it. At all. Ever.

It is like you never had a dog, so you go and buy the most difficult breed: a Shiba Inu. "Hey, let us start a Neurosymbolic AI company. A SaaS company is too easy."

If you didn't know, most AI companies take a large language model. Wrap a UI around it. Add a logo. Call it "AI-powered." That is not intelligence. That is a skin.

A very expensive, very risky skin. The kind that raises Series A rounds and produces output that reads like it was written by a committee of chimpanzees high on Adderall.

They don't often do so well in the long term. Especially after VCs find out there is no tech depth. No defensible IP. Nor a plan to create one.

Building a category-defining neurosymbolic AI company is not for everyone. It requires insane levels of IQ. The kind that makes me the dumbest person in the room. And I am fine with that. I am spectacularly fine with that.

Two years ago it was me and a bunch of raccoons. Today I am the dumbest person in a room full of A-players.

This is what I call progress.

Written by Emin Can Turan, Founder and Lead Researcher at Pebbles Ai

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