How The People That Google Hires Has Changed Since Its IPO

Hunter Walk, who was at Google before and after its IPO, tells Twitter how employee hires at its firm will be different after it goes public:

A Different Type of Employee Gets Hired [after it is public]: It's silly to say that Twitter will no longer be a startup once they IPO. The reality is they're not a startup now — risk is off the table, thousands of employees, hundreds of millions in revenue. Post-IPO though there's a psychology that seems to impact potential hires — you start getting fewer risk takers applying and more careerists. This isn't absolutely a bad thing — hiring more experienced leaders is important for a company's stability and Twitter has certainly already raided lots of Google talent to build its management layer — but it does start to change the personality of the company. People would sometimes ask me if post-IPO did Google start hiring "B+" talent instead of "A" (the assumption being that the best people would no longer want to work at Google). My answer was a definitive NO. We still hired "A" quality people, it was just increasingly a different type of smart. More pragmatic, more about scale.