Bronte is hiring - a follow up...
APPLICATIONS ARE NOW CLOSED. We received 270 plus - and we are finalizing a short list...
As many know - Bronte Capital - the asset manager - has advertised for their first employee.
I have gone through my email fairly carefully and I should have replied to every single application although more than 200 in the negative.
I found five applications in the "junk mail folder" and I fear I may have missed a few others.
If I have not replied to you please resend to brontecapital@gmail.com and make sure you get a reply. If you are interested enough to consider working for us and devoting a good part of your life to Bronte then we owe you the courtesy of a reply.
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We are currently about half way through a "preliminary round" interview where I ask some questions testing
(a) basic science and a scientific understanding of the world,
(b) thoughts about how you may build our computer systems [targeted at our quite unusual needs], and
(c) business analysis [mostly for looking at longs].
We have found nobody who answers all three sets of questions well - but a few who answer two of the three well.* [Some of these people are very high quality - just not entirely on our needs...]
This means that eventually we will need more than one employee though we are at the moment very focussed on the computing problems and we would prefer doing those things really well. [We are not much into compromise...]
All of the people who do "two out of three" well are expensive: they have good jobs, are aged over 30 and I would need to promise them a lot to make them move. [And I am reluctant to promise a lot for a compromise employee...]
I will consider someone who does the computing part well but is cheaper (which probably means younger). I would probably hire a young, entrepreneurial computer geek who wants to be taught the business analysis stuff - especially if they were Australian based already... If I get someone like that I can spend more on the next employee.
Above all else I am interested in intellectual firepower (I want to hire people smarter than me, especially in the computer task) and the ability to actually implement this stuff.
Still I have another 20 or so preliminary interviews to go. Who knows what I will find...
John
*I have high standards. One senior Silicon Valley executive I tested on the questions suggested that he knew several people under 30 who meet my criterion - but they are mostly going to wind up worth 100 million dollars - and that a surprising number worked at Facebook. He thought I was being unrealistic.
J