Miha somehow manages to capture all the best characteristics of the stereotypical hardcore software engineer without all the bad characteristics that often go along with them.

He really cares about his craft - keeping up to date on everything, being at the forefront of new ideas, and thinking deeply about it - but he also cares about other stuff too, with a wide variety of interests & hobbies, even creating a podcast about the interests of software engineers!

He really cares about doing things right - about executing to a high standard and following best practices - but he's also highly pragmatic, willing to challenge convention and be flexible when it makes sense.

He's anal about the details of what he does - understanding everything he's doing deeply - but he also strives to understand the bigger picture behind his work - what his work is actually doing and the reasons for it.

He's highly opinionated and assertive - expressing his thoughts deeply and strongly - but he does it in a way that is respectful and collaborative, with the goal of finding the best solution for everyone, and is eager to change his mind when he's wrong.

He's able to take direction well - to solve a tightly-specced out problem extremely well - but he's also able to be self-directed - to take a loose problem description and figure out the best solution on his own.

Miha is - and I mean this in the best way possible - a nerd, and he's also a delightful guy to hang around, who's not just able to communicate the topics of his nerdiness well, but is also able talk about lots of other stuff too, try new things, and not have the overly-narrow-minded obsessiveness that sometimes goes along with being a nerd - he captures the best of nerdiness - the caring, the obsession, the perfection - while also being able to transcend and expand it.

Basically, he's a really, really great guy.

Marina joined us after 8 years of working with digital marketing agencies.

During the interview process, I spoke with 4 of her former colleagues, clients and collaborators as references. When I asked one of them about Marina, his reaction was something like: "If you don't hire her, you're stupid". The other references much echoed this sentiment.

Eastern Europeans aren't known for being so openly complimentary so I was a little bit sceptical - I tried to interrogate them but the rationale in each case seemed bulletproof.

In a variety of contexts - from multi-city video shoots to huge creative digital campaigns - she'd taken responsibility for every element of big projects and nailed the execution, while also being a creative and supportive teammate, leader, and collaborator.

I could list some examples but they're too far-flung and numerous to mention but I will say that, in every responsibility, she took on, she owned what she had to do completely, pushed the scope of it beyond what was expected, and really gave a fuck about the outcome. She made it so that I didn't have to worry about all kinds of things that I'm bad at - in full confidence that they're taken care of to perfection - from hiring, to project management, to creative ideation.

She also became the central point of contact for our clients, building up a deep empathy for and understanding of our users, becoming the person who acted as the voice of the customer in all of our discussions.

I would hire her again in any kind of operations leadership or client-facing leadership role - especially in a company that's scaling post-Product-Market-Fit. Or pretty much anything - I have no doubt she'd figure it out and I have no doubt that she'd do so while being a joy to work with while doing so.

A few years ago, Yurko was frustrated that he couldn't make his ideas a reality as a designer, so he took it upon himself to build out his development skills by creating a bunch of the projects that he wanted to see in the world.

He succeeded, taught himself thoroughly, and had built a bunch of technically impressive, interesting, and creative projects by the time we came across him. The thought and care that he put into these projects blew us away and we instantly needed to hire him!

However, he'd primarily been a designer before and had never actually worked in a company as an engineer - meaning he hadn't shipped production code in the frameworks we were using and had never collaborated with a team of engineers. He also had fairly basic English, having spent most of his life in Ukraine.

Despite this, during his time with Advisable, he easily overcame each of these disadvantages and lived up to the promise we saw in him in every way.

He became not only a highly-productive team member, but also sky-rocketed his productivity, fleshed out his front-end and design skills, built out a back-end development skillset, and now even speaks better and more-precise English than many native speakers I know!

While he's grown so much, I have no doubt that he'll grow even more and continue to be a remarkable talent, while also remaining one of the most thoughtful, understanding and kind people I'm lucky enough to know.

I know that the characteristics that led to Yurko teaching himself to be an engineer out of a desire to build, the ones that led him to work on the delightful projects he built, and the ones that led him to continuing to push and figure out himself, will also lead him to so many great things in life.

I first met John when he was a small baby - only a few days old at the time. He didn't have much to say so I wasn't sure what to make of him but I figured, why not build a relationship and see where it goes?

Luckily, we stayed in touch because when I was starting Advisable, he was building a reputation as a world-class growth specialist - he'd helped companies like Glofox and XSellCo acquire millions in MRR with his ingenious and impeccably-executed campaigns.

Thankfully, I hadn't rubbed him the wrong way too much during our long relationship and he agreed to help Advisable do the same!

He built an insane system for targeting potential clients based on data scraped from across the web - basically, it would target companies based on public signals like job postings, hiring, or fundraisings. His initiatives were responsible for the vast majority of the c. $3m in bookings we did in our lifetime, helping us acquire 100s of great clients like StackOverflow, BigCommerce, Uberall, and many more.

However, when we decided to pivot our product, growth became less of a priority as we endeavoured to try to build a more robust product-driven approach that could scale infinitely. During this time, he evolved from not only being a great hands-on operator, to basically acting as a co-founder - taking on a variety of impossible-to-define and tricky projects, thinking very deeply about things, challenging every decision, and generally pushing for every element of what we were doing to be better.

Whenever John said something was wrong, I came to know that he was probably right. If he said something wasn't bad, I knew that to most it was probably good but could be better. If he told me something was great, I knew it was probably amazing.

Had we succeeded, I know that John would've continued to grow into an incredible leader, and at various points would have been the determining factor in making the best decisions in a difficult, pivotal circumstances - especially if the solution required bravery and ingenuity.

He then would've gotten his hands dirty no matter the domain to make sure that it happened in the right way, in the right time. This is the exact kind of person you want on a team of any size but definitely in a startup.

While I'm sad he wasn't able to continue having this impact at Advisable, once he figures out what he wants to do - I have no doubt that he'll do this and so much more.

The day Annie joined, it became immediately obvious what a furnace of energy, positivity and order she'd be for our team. She was hired to build a community for the talent on our platform and she immediately hit the ground running, jumping on calls with our users, learning from them, and hyping them up about what we were doing.

What stood out from her background was her deep project management and marketing experience - she had led a South East Asian market for Trivago, before joining the marketing team in their HQ - and she brought this and so much more to the team.

She worked tirelessly to bring our community to life - running marketing for it, project managing a complex recruitment process, and building a team of community managers.

And not only that, but she also did the same for our company. She became the glue that brought us together and helped evolve us from a rag-tag group of misfits into a cohesive team. She did this by running team events, but also just by taking a special effort to bring people together to connect on calls and at events, and by being a vibrant, fun presence at all times.

In all of these roles she was able to pair a deeply human and fun spirit with professionalism and seriousness when appropriate.

There are so many roles I can imagine Annie excelling at, at so many different types of companies that it's tough to pin down but I can imagine her being an incredible hire in any role that involves some combination of marketing, product and project management - connecting the dots and bringing energy and organisation to make things happen between multiple groups of people in dynamic environments.

Alex joined us straight from university. He'd been studying computer engineering but was put off by spending too much time writing C++ and running compilers so he wanted to work on something a little bit more tangible.

As a result, during his studies, he took it upon himself to build his skillset as a designer, and his front-end development skills in Webflow. He showcased with a personal portfolio website that attracted my attention!

He started with us as an intern, before we quickly hired him full-time and, during his time with us, he built out high-quality websites, landing pages, products, and more at a startup pace to enable us to rapidly test, enhance and adjust our positioning. He continued to learn, growing immensely as a designer and Webflow developer - jumping leaps and bounds from where he started.

In addition to this, he managed projects across various other areas - from building out a tool that leverages AI to create articles automatically, to managing complex integrations between different platforms.

He did this while also exhibiting curiosity about so many different areas of the world, pushing himself to learn, and pushing himself to be better in every way.

And he's only 24! I have no idea what Alex will do next but I know that, if he continues to exhibit the characteristics he has so far, he has such a great future ahead of him and I'm excited to witness it.

Jonathan joined us during a very chaotic period. We were still working on a previous version of our product and he was hired to run a sales/client management process specific to that version.

Within a few months of him joining, it became increasingly obvious that what we were doing would have to change. At this point, it would've been understandable for us to let him go - after all, the role he was hired for was basically redundant.

However, even during this short period, he'd shown a tremendous amount of energy and initiative and it felt like his kind of energy, attitude, and skillset would really come in handy during the chaos.

We were extremely lucky that we kept him - whenever a new project came up that required any mix of sales, people management, and project management, I knew that Jonathan would be more than up for the task - even if he had never done something similar before.

This led to him running a weird and wonderful range of projects - from creating and managing a team of 10+ interviewers and editors to create hundreds of case studies to running and optimising a sales-coaching process, to sourcing guests for and managing a podcast.

In each of these varied and multi-faceted roles, he took ownership, got the best out of his team, and delivered excellent results. While he was very willing to ask for help when needed, I was able to mostly not worry about what was going on while he just figured it out.

I'd hire Jonathan again in any kind of sales leadership, generalist management, or business development role - especially one that required flexibility, hustle and a willingness to get your hands dirty!

Thomas initially joined having been highly recommended by my friend Tony - who tends to have a very high bar for talent. I can't remember Tony's exact words but they were something along the lines of "Thomas is a unicorn - someone who's simultaneously an excellent full-stack developer, and also being an excellent designer - he's probably in the top 0.1% of people you could hire"

It goes without saying that all of the above was true - Thomas builds a damn good product.

I could go into depth on that but I don't think that this alone captures why Thomas is so great - what maybe helps capture this is that he's also a brilliant musician, a very good writer, a good rock climber, makes beautiful furniture, and is probably great at so much more that I don't even know about!

It's basically no accident that Thomas is a 'unicorn' - he's the epitome of an ever-learning, beginners mindset. If he doesn't understand something, he'll approach it with intense curiosity until he does, figure out what it means to do it as well as possible, and then persist with it until he actually does this. This means that he can probably basically learn anything at an incredible pace and probably - and I don't say this lightly - do anything.

With Advisable, he applied this pursuit of brilliance to everything from our product's design, to our admin interface, to how he managed complex transitions, to creating documentation, to product management, to human management, to design workflows, to running meetings...and a lot more.

This is why I truly believe - had Advisable scaled to a team of 10,000+ - if he wanted to - Thomas could've been a key member of the senior leadership, managing teams of teams of engineers and designers while also being a key strategic contributor at that scale. I say this not because he has experience doing this, but because I know he would've figured every element of it out. And I'm sure he would've also done this while living a great, well-rounded, happy life.

Basically, he's probably now in the top 0.0001% of people you can hire.

We'd been working with an outsourced finance provider for a year before discovering Sofia.

While we were frustrated by the previous firm, it was only upon seeing how great Sofia was that I realised how mediocre the previous firm was.

She came in and interrogated our processes, rapidly spotting where things didn't make sense or were suboptimal, understanding them, and bringing them to me.

She was proactive in improving things and refined everything we were doing from a finance perspective until it was a well-oiled machine.

She spotted errors that the previous provider had made - sometimes, ones that had happened up to a year before! - and she took it upon herself to fix these errors, even though that involved navigating awkward interactions with 3rd parties.

She made sure things ran as smoothly as possible - making sure that she set things up so that she could be as autonomous as possible while also allowing me the comfort of oversight where it mattered.

In everything she did, she showed so much thoughtfulness, care and diligence and I genuinely struggle to think of how she could've been better!