Lovable CEO Anton Osika says he looks for four key attributes when he hires for his company.
Osika said in an interview with Business Insider on Wednesday that he looks for candidates for his vibe coding startup who demonstrate "slope, breadth, curiosity, and bias to build."
Firstly, Osika said candidates needed to have "slope, not just skill." The 35-year-old said that a candidate's "slope" refers to their ability to pick up new skills and navigate a learning curve.
"I care more about how fast someone learns and adapts than where they are today. If a conversation feels alive, if I walk away having learned something new, that's a strong sign they'll thrive in the team and push our ways of working forward," Osika said.
Secondly, Osika said he looks for "generalists over narrow specialists." He added that he would rather bring in people "who can do a bit of everything—design, code, product thinking—than someone world-class in just one thing."
"Range matters when you're building new categories," he said.
Thirdly, Osika said he wants to see potential hires demonstrate "first principles thinking." His company needs people "who don't just copy playbooks but ask why things are the way they are," he added.
"That curiosity and ability to reason from scratch is often what gives you an edge," Osika said.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in an interview back in 2012 that thinking from first principles often results in more innovative ideas.
"The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. We are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it's like what other people are doing," Musk told entrepreneur Kevin Rose in 2012.
"It's mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles. First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world, and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths," Musk added.
Lastly, Osika said he wants to have "builders, not talkers" on his team.
"We're biased toward people who show they can ship, iterate, and make something real—whether that's a product, a project, or even just a hack that proves a point," he said.
The race for AI talent has seen tech giants like Meta and Microsoft offer massive signing bonuses to entice potential hires. Osika, however, said throwing money wouldn't make recruiting easier for Lovable.
"If I knew who was the perfect engineer to hire, I could maybe step up our compensation bands to get exactly those. But I don't know who are the best people," Osika told podcaster Harry Stebbings in an interview that aired Monday.
"So I need to just figure out — are these really, really good people to work with? Are they moldable? Are they going to work well together in this team?" he said.
