Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world

Tyler’s distribution strategy, application design, intellectual tastes, and influence on awardees all interplay to explain his success as a talent curator.

-Distribution: Tyler promotes the opportunity in such a way that the talent level of the application pool is extraordinarily high and the people who apply are uniquely earnest.

Tyler's success at discovering and enabling the most talented people before anyone else notices them boils down to four components:

-Application: Emergent Ventures’ application is laser focused on the quality of the applicant’s ideas, and boils out the noise of credentials, references, and test scores.

Tyler has identified talent either earlier than or missed by top undergraduate programs, the best biotech startups, and the best biotech investors, all without any insider knowledge of biotech. In comparison, Forbes 30U30, MIT Tech Review TR35, or Stat Wunderkind, and other industry awards that highlight talent are lagging indicators of success. It... See more

-Selection: Tyler has relentlessly trained his taste for decades, the way a world class athlete trains for the olympics.

-Inspiration: Tyler personally encourages winners to be bolder, creating an ambition flywheel as they in turn inspire future applicants.

First, cultivate pools of talent that are very high in quality, even if very low in quantity. Recognize that people have already self-selected on media channels like Twitter, blogs, and podcasts, on discord/slack, or even in group houses. Design incentives to attract the applicants seeking the right things, for example by using an evaluation strate... See more

For entrepreneurs in today’s environment, talent, not capital, is the limiting factor in company building. Finding and recruiting talent is also the core task of venture capital investing, building a research lab, or managing a university.