Talent

Talent is what happens when two brilliant and profoundly iconoclastic minds apply their imagination to one of the hardest of all business problems: the search for good people. I loved it. – Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia and The Tipping PointTalent is everything―whether in investing and building startups, or in other creative endeavors. Between product, market, and people, I’ve always bet on the last one as the biggest predictor of success. But while talent may be everywhere, it’s unevenly distributed, and hard to ‘find.’ So how do we better discover, filter, and match the best talent with the best opportunities? This book shares how, based on both scientific research and the authors’ own experiences. The future depends on this know-how. – Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen HorowitzThe most important job of any leader is to find individuals with a ‘creative spark,’ and the potential to discover, invent and build the future. If you want to learn the art and science of spotting and empowering exceptional people, Talent is brimming with fresh insights and actionable advice. – Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO of GoogleTwo of the premier talent spotters working today, Cowen and Gross have written the definitive history of identifying talent. Anyone who is interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, or the roots of America’s start-up economy must read this book. – Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of VantaI do not know of any skills more worth developing than the ability to find exceptional undeveloped talent. I have spent many years trying to get good at that, and I was still astonished by how much I learned reading this book. – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

Tyler Cowen (Ph.D.) holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Discover Your Inner Economist (2007), Create Your Own Economy (2009), the New York Times bestseller The Great Stagnation (2011), An Economist Get Lunch (2012), Average is Over (2013), and a number of academic books. He writes the most read economics blog worldwide. He has written regularly for The New York Times and contributes to a wide number of newspapers and periodicals.

Daniel Gross is an entrepreneur and investor. At 18, he was accepted into Y-Combinator, the youngest founder ever at the time. He founded Cue, an AI-powered search engine, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. In 2018, Daniel founded Pioneer, a search engine for the millions of “Lost Einstein’s” – extraordinarily creative people around the world who have the talent, but lack opportunity.