The Generalyst Manifesto for Startups

Dominik here, founder of Generalyst. I’ve been wrapping my brain around attracting and hiring the best talent for most of my career. First, for finding the best ICU nurses for German university hospitals as co-founder at Linguedo, then for my own international expansion teams at Sdui. 

More recently, I’ve focused on early-stage startups with Generalyst: to find the generalists that act as the catalysts for driving massive growth. 

This manifesto outlines the foundational beliefs behind the company. 

Let’s begin.

The future belongs to generalists.

In the old world, specialization was the name of the game. Pick a lane. Stay in it. Master your craft. Have a career.

This world was linear. One development would lead to another, slow and steady.

That world is gone. We now live in a world of exponential development, where breakthroughs happen on a daily basis. Many of the things we learned in school or university are already obsolete five years later. With the advent of AI, the pace becomes ever faster. Schools won’t keep up. 

In this new, exponential world, adaptability is the name of the game. 

In fact, it has always been the name of the game. 

Humans are everywhere in the world because of their adaptability. Other species outperform humans in their natural habitat, but there is no single species out there that can live in all environments alike.

Put a polar bear into the African savannah and it dies. 

Put a lion into the Russian tundra and it dies.

Put a human in either of these places, and it survives, if not thrives.

We now live in that exponential world. Your business lives there, too. 

Five years ago, we hired large engineering teams full of juniors to produce as much code as possible. Today, a few seasoned engineers generate ten times their output in a fraction of the time. 

None of those engineers is an individual contributor anymore. They all manage something: some manage people, but almost all of them manage an AI. 

Individual contributors are specialists. The higher up the management ladder you go, the more generalist you need to be: a team lead still has one specialty to manage, a Head Of needs to manage 2-3 disciplines, but the CEO? They need to understand all aspects of the business, adapt & process new information from a variety of disciplines. 

With AI now handling more and more of the specialized things, even the lowest level employees will need to think broader. 

More generalist, you could say. 

This means: 

1. Companies will need less people. 
2. Everybody in the company will manage something. 
3. Most job descriptions will change over time. 

When a company hires less people, the impact of each employee increases – in both directions: hire an all-star, and they’ll elevate everybody around them; make a mishire, and the company’s performance will suffer.

This effect becomes even more prevalent at an early stage. 

The first hire you make shapes your next 10. Your first 10 hires shape your next 100. Your first 100 hires shape your next 1000. 

The most expensive mistake you can make is to hire the wrong people at the beginning. Get the first ten hires right, and the next hundred will be a lot easier. 

So not only do you need people with a broader skillset than before, you also need the right people. 

We can help with that. 

Introducing: Generalyst.

While for the average person and the average company, the job market might be efficient, it’s wildly inefficient at the edges. 

The average person isn’t a generalist. 

The average company isn’t a high-growth, early-stage startup. 

Which makes both job and candidate search like trying to find a needle in a haystack. 

The exponential world doesn’t only bring good things. It also brings us AI-generated applications. It’s become too easy to apply for a job, leading to an avalanche of applications. 

How do you filter out the signal among so much noise? 

When a market is inefficient, it needs a middleman. 

Someone that curates. 

Someone that gives you 5 great fits instead of 1000 unfiltered applications. 

At Generalyst, we aspire to be that middleman between A+ generalists and high-growth, early-stage startups. 

The catalysts for driving exponential growth. 

Most startups I know aim for non-linear results. Exponential growth. 10X revenue. Breakthrough innovation.

Yet they’re hiring top business school graduates, management consultants, investment bankers. Highly linear careers.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. A lot of these candidates are, in fact, smart, ambitious, and driven. We look at these markers at Generalyst, too. 

But if that’s the only thing you look at, you’re missing a key piece: 

You can’t expect non-linear results from linear people.

Hiring “known commodities” minimizes your downside. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or hiring McKinsey. But in startups, you’re in the business of maximizing your upside. You can’t have both.

Great linear profiles are easy to identify. 

Great non-linear profiles are not.

This is how we identify great people; the signal among the noise: 

The four traits of a great candidate.

We have four core beliefs around what makes a great candidate:

[1] How you do anything is how you do everything.

We look for indicators of excellence everywhere in their life, not just in their career:

• Playing sports or music at a high level (national team athletes, musical prodigies)
• Battling through adverse circumstances (migrating from another country, graduating from university as the first in their family)
• Building functional side projects (running student organizations, creating a side business, managing a community)
• Achieving exceptional results in academics or career (extremely high GPA / GMAT scores, outperforming expectations in their jobs)

You become excellent by doing ordinary things for an extraordinary amount of time. Excellence always follows hard work and grit. 

[2] High Agency is the single most important idea of the 21st century.

(h/t to George Mack and one of the best essays ever)

The best question to describe high agency: would you call this person if you were in a third-world prison? Would they be able to get you out of there?

High agency people have the “it” factor, a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Life is not happening to them, they are happening to life.

They get shit done. Without asking for instructions. They bring a combination of disagreeability, bias for action, and clear thinking.

High Agency traits include: 

• intentionally moving countries because you realize you’re in the wrong place
• launching a business to solve your own problem
• taking action when the odds are stacked against you
• setting your sights on a goal, then achieving it one way or another 

You can’t afford to hire someone that needs guidance every step of the way. 

High Agency candidates keep ownership until the outcome has been achieved. 

[3] The best candidates are proactive, not reactive

I used to work with an event manager who did the preparation for our fairs. Every time a problem arose, I called her to find the solution – only to learn that she had already anticipated the problem and the solution was in one of the boxes. 

A mind-blowing experience. 

Imagine you hire someone to work closely with you, and before you realize something becomes a problem, they’ve already come up with a solution. That’s proactivity. 

Average people do what you tell them to. 

Great people do what needs to be done before anyone tells them. 

[4] Clarity of thinking = clarity of writing = clarity of communication.

Startups are a messy place. It’s already difficult enough to maintain order, so the last thing you need is someone without clarity of thinking. Instead, you want someone that thinks clearly, puts their thoughts onto paper, and communicates effectively.

How do you assess that? 

The greatest thinkers in the world are all prolific writers. Putting thoughts on paper structures the mess in your brain wonderfully. Writing a lot encodes information in chunks and gives you ways to communicate with higher precision. 

This ability is becoming rarer and rarer: as anyone can now use AI to write grammatically correct, buzzwordy texts, fewer and fewer do the writing themselves.

The ones who do are the ones who will continue to hone their ability to think.

For as long as most communication still happens in the written word (emails, Slack, documentation, but also prompting LLMs), writing will be a key skill. One that we index very highly on. 

That’s why we look at the way candidates write. And yes, it’s easy to tell what’s GPT-written and what’s not. 

When a candidate meets these four criteria, we believe they’ll make a fantastic one. 

Which appears to be a somewhat contrarian take in the Berlin startup scene. 

Sometimes, I talk to founders and they say things like: “for us, a good candidate is someone who went to WHU / Mannheim / TUM, was top 10% there, and then worked at MBB for 2+ years.”

Letting universities and companies with a proven hiring process that works for them do the screening work for you appears to be a useful heuristic. But just because a candidate is what McKinsey needs, doesn’t mean it’s the candidate that you need. 

You, my brother in Christ, are in fact not running a management consultancy. Or an investment bank. Or a massive scale-up.

Don’t get me wrong: most of these candidates will be very good. But (a) they’re likely not what you need at an early stage, and (b) they’re rare. 

We believe that the best candidates often can’t be recognized simply by looking at their CV. They’ve had winding career paths. Pivots in their journey. Bring a unique perspective to life and work. 

If you refuse to interview anyone that doesn’t have the “perfect” business school CV, then working with Generalyst will likely not make you happy. 

We’d simply recommend getting a LinkedIn Recruiter account and filtering for these profiles. 

If, however, the core beliefs in this manifesto resonate with you, then working with Generalyst might be a fantastic idea.

Now that you understand what a good candidate looks like – how do we find them? 

We don't. They find us.

How the best candidates find Generalyst

(and how you benefit from them)

Let’s be real: the best candidates out there probably aren’t applying to your company. They already have a job. And if they don’t, chances are that they already have solid opportunities lined up. 

How do you catch them? 

By making them an offer they cannot refuse. 

Generalyst’s offer to candidates is: apply once, get exposure to 15-20 startups you may never have heard of before, get support during your interview process, and have someone negotiate on your behalf (if needed). While being part of an exclusive, elite community of like-minded people. 

Zero cost. 5 minutes to apply. 

If you were a candidate and looking for a new challenge, you’d be stupid not to participate in the program. 

We look at these applications, evaluate candidates on the 4 principles outlined in this manifesto, and then invite them to come listen to startup pitches. 

For example, your startup pitch. Now, instead of having a candidate glance over a job description, you have their full attention for 30 minutes. 

You’re a founder. You know how to convince someone. You just need 30 minutes with a good candidate. 

Generalyst gives you those 30 minutes. 

And sends you the candidates that want to work with you within 24 hours after the pitch. 

This gives you two filters: 

1. We’ve already interviewed the candidate and whittled down the field to the best ones
2. All candidates you interview are keen to work with you. 

So instead of looking at hundreds of applications with lots of noise, you get 2-5 applications with lots of signal. 

At this point, you haven’t paid anything yet. 

Value is only created when you make a hire. If the candidates you get from other sources are better than the ones from Generalyst, we simply didn’t do our job right. 

So we only charge if you make a hire. Capture value where it’s created; not before, not after. 

Business works best when all parties win: 

• Candidates get their dream job
• You get your dream candidate
• Generalyst gets to continue running its business 

Life can be so simple. 

In summary: 

• The future belongs to generalists.
• With faster change, adaptability becomes more important. 
• Generalists are more adaptable than specialists. 
• Every employee will manage a bunch of different things. 
• To manage different things, you need a broader view. 
• Generalists have a broader view. 
• The market for rare hires like this is inefficient. 
• So hiring a middleman makes sense.
• Generalyst aspires to be that middleman. 
• We screen for talent based on excellence, agency, proactivity, clarity of thinking. 
• And attract those by making an irresistible offer. 
• While aligning incentives for everyone involved. 
• To create a win-win situation for all parties. 

Let’s work together.

If you’ve read this far, there are 2 possible options:

1. You’re shaking your head and think “this guy is out of his mind”.
2. You’ve loved everything you’ve read so far.

If (1) is the case, thank you for reading this far regardless! 

If (2) is the case, it’s time to take action:

If you run an early-stage startup: let’s hop on a call to see whether it makes sense to work together (book here). You can also download our sales deck if you want more information. 

If you’re an (aspiring) generalist and want to apply: fill out this form. 

Thanks for reading. 

Further Reading

• How to build strategic moats for your small company
• Generalists exist on a spectrum, from highly specialized to true generalist
• Dominik’s keynote on the future belonging to generalists

Newsletter: www.dominiknitsch.com/newsletter

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dominiknitsch

Email: dominik@generalyst.de 

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Thanks to Christian Keller, Kai Hübner, Patrick de Castro Neuhaus, Moritz Möker, and Lara Kuhn for reading drafts of this and providing feedback.