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JY Jerry Ye On How I Invest with David Weisburd

“Each engineer or each product person you're adding that could have made an extra 100K, 200K per year at a Mag 7 could be seen as like a mini round. And in aggregate, that's actually a very strong signal in terms of conviction for the company.”

How I Invest with David Weisburd · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Each engineer or each product person you're adding that could have made an extra 100K, 200K per year at a Mag 7 could be seen as like a mini round. And in aggregate, that's actually a very strong signal in terms of conviction for the company.” — Jerry Ye, How I Invest with David Weisburd

Context

Ye was explaining how talent data can show which startups are getting traction. An employee who gives up a big-tech salary for startup equity is betting their career, much like an investor.

Transcript

How I Invest with David Weisburd Around 06:52 into the episode
Jerry Ye

This really depends on the sector, right? And I remember like an early study that showed PhDs and enterprise tended to have better outcomes, right? So domain experience, if your particular niche or your sector requires that domain expertise. Something like a

David Weisburd

very hard and technical problem. Yeah.

Jerry Ye

And this is a reason why if you look at Neurops, right? I think from 15 years ago, it was like a small niche little academic research conference for 200, 300 people. Now it's you're talking about 20, 30,000 people, right? And VCs are constantly there on the conference floor trying to source and identify the next deal. But that doesn't really matter at all for consumer companies, right? Where you might have a very strong pedigree founder and team, but you don't have traction, right? And traction in that case is actually super important. So it really depends, right? And it's not just the founders. It's also who you're able to attract after you start the company. So your founding team, the people you're able to pull away from the Mag 7, how you're getting these additive people. Because one way that I like looking at it is similar to a venture round, right? Each engineer or each product person you're adding that could have made an extra 100K, 200K per year at a Mag 7 could be seen as like a mini round, right? And in aggregate…

David Weisburd

So another way they could have gotten a higher salary at a Mag 7 firm. Instead, they're foregoing that salary for stock. So they're betting with their own career and with their own time into that startup. And that's a very strong signal.

Jerry Ye

Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what venture. Capitalizer are doing as well, right? They are, you know, investing their capital for carry or stock going forward. And this is the same thing.

David Weisburd

The difference there, you could argue, is that venture capitalists maybe have two, three, four meetings with the team, and somebody that's quitting Google to go join a startup is probably doing a lot more diligence. It's probably talking to a lot more friends that work at this company. There's much…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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