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BS Bryce Strauss On TruthWorks

“I do a final interview with everyone joining Nominal and I have them stack rank the risks that they have with joining Nominal. And I speak as clearly as I possibly can to each. And I usually amplify them rather than mitigate them.”

TruthWorks · October 2026

“I do a final interview with everyone joining Nominal and I have them stack rank the risks that they have with joining Nominal. And I speak as clearly as I possibly can to each. And I usually amplify them rather than mitigate them.” — Bryce Strauss, TruthWorks

Describing how his company recruits against frontier labs and well-funded rivals by being blunt about its problems. He tells hires they're joining something under-resourced "so that it doesn't feel like hypocrisy on day one."

Transcript

TruthWorks Around 33:18 into the episode
Speaker 4

…to treat every step and like counter positioned against these like very disingenuous processes they're running elsewhere. Like again, if they're interviewing at nominal, they're probably interviewing at every Frontier Lab and every other big fancy company with big fancy VCs. And you have a fancy,

Jessica Neal

you have a pretty fancy VC.

Speaker 4

Well, right. I'm going to say, so like we can stand up and like have that credibility, but we can meet them as a human and give them a hard problem to solve. And like, anyway, like we love the process of being honest. And then I do a final interview with everyone joining Nominal and I have them stack rank. Oh, I shouldn't tell everyone this, but I will. I have them stack rank the risks that they have with joining nominal. And I speak as clearly as I possibly can to each. And I usually amplify them rather than mitigate them. But I say, hey, like, you have to understand, like, you are getting involved in something where we are under-resourced. We are fighting hard. Like, we are going to count on you. And like, I'm going to tell you every initial condition that you're walking into so that like it doesn't feel like hypocrisy on day one. Like they. Walk in and they're like, Whoa, that's a lot of work. Yeah,

Jessica Neal

like they were right.

Speaker 4

Yeah, right. And it's like, we're gonna, we're gonna figure this out together. And like, that is a good place to be. But, like, as you think about supporting that, like, when rubber meets the road, like a lot of work feels like a lot of work. And so, um, we, we try to find these like good, both…

Jessica Neal

Call name and a bomber jacket.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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