WHO We Hire

About WHO We Hire

WHO We Hire is built on a simple premise: no great company gets built without great people. Luiz Cent talks with founders, CEOs, CTOs, CPOs, COOs, and executives at technology companies to unpack how they hire, where they've gotten it wrong, and what they've learned scaling teams from the ground up. Topics include hiring strategy, talent acquisition, team building, leadership, company culture, scaling startups, and building high-performance teams in SaaS and tech. If you're a founder, operator, executive, board member, or VC, this show is for you.

Publisher

Luiz Cent

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 Apr 2026

Latest episode

3 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 27 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   3 Nov 2026

   From A Punjab Village To CEO of Birbals Inc: How He Hires In Multiple Countries

   Pawan Bangar is the Founder & CEO of Birbals Inc., a global digital transformation and AI firm he launched in 2003 from India and relaunched in California in 2011. Over 23 years, he has built a distributed team across the US, India, Canada, and Melbourne without a single COVID layoff, no salary reductions, and no formal education requirement for hires. After completing an executive program at Wharton focused on leadership and neuroscience, Pawan returned with a sharper framework for team building, retention, and deploying AI without replacing people. In this episode, he reveals the exact hiring rules, retention philosophy, and AI playbook that let Birbals do more with fewer people while keeping every team member employed. What You'll Learn: - Why Pawan takes personal blame when a hire quits in 3 months and the selection process that prevents it - The 2-year rule he applies before making any hire: "Do I have two years of work for this person?" - How he hired an 18-year-old cold-caller with no degree who now runs all India operations - Why Birbals didn't lay off a single employee or cut a single salary during COVID - The retrain-don't-replace playbook: how he moved SEO staff into QA and front-end dev instead of firing them - Why he hires full-stack generalists now and cut headcount from 10 to 4 using AI - The "take care of the team, the team takes care of the client" model and the direct-WhatsApp-to-CEO policy that backs it - What a Wharton neuroscience elective taught him about oxytocin, eye contact, and closing deals Chapters: 00:00 From engineering college to founding Birbals 01:30 Why talent has no boundaries, hiring across 4 countries 04:49 The 18-year-old cold-caller with no degree who became Head of India Ops 06:04 How to spot hunger: response time and follow-up as hiring signals 07:21 Hiring full-stack generalists in the AI era 08:21 Retraining SEO staff instead of laying them off 10:26 Why he spent his own money on Wharton to fix himself as the bottleneck 12:08 People-first leadership: team before client 12:52 Zero layoffs, direct CEO access, and real raises every year 18:08 Why vibe-coding isn't production-ready, the human-in-the-loop rule 24:14 Building a 2-month app with 2 people instead of a 2-year team of 10 27:19 The COVID test: how client relationships saved every job at Birbals 29:44 "If they quit in 3 months, it's my fault," the 2-year hiring rule 31:49 What a Wharton neuroscience elective taught him about leadership 33:56 Remote-first in Mumbai: giving back the 4-hour commute 35:16 Birbals Launchpad, building MVPs with founders Where to find Pawan Bangar: Pawan Bangar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pawanbangar/ Birbals Inc.: https://birbals.com Keppy (pet app): https://keppy.ai Where to find Luiz Cent: Website: https://latamcent.com/ Who We Hire: https://whowehire.org/

2. 

   27 Oct 2026

   Jeff Gothelf's 20-Year Rule: Measure Behavior, Not Output — Even In Hiring

   Host Luiz Cent interviews author Jeff Gothelf about measuring candidate behavior over output to build better teams.

3. 

   20 Oct 2026

   Why Lusha's CEO Hires Hungry People Over Experienced Executives

   Lusha CEO Yoni Tserruya shares his counterintuitive hiring philosophy, prioritizing hunger over experience to build adaptable, AI-driven teams.

Inside a recent episode

Pearl VP: Why Companies Laying People Off For AI Will Regret It In 18 Months

Published 28 Jul 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Right. With finance, I get even more nervous because a single hallucination cascades through a spreadsheet or through a model to an insane degree. So there are no roles I'm not hiring for because of AI. I think what AI has done is complicate org design, incredibly so. Because much like we can all have our own companies and stuff like that, what it's done is we're all still masters of our vertical, but we're all T-shaped, right? We're kind of like okay at a bunch of things. It has dramatically increased the number of things that we can all be mediocre at. So I can write mediocre code, engineers can do mediocre product marketing, sales reps are knocking up like mediocre MVPs to show prospects just on lovable or whatever. […]

Who has been a guest on WHO We Hire

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Jeff Gothelf
• Yoni Tserruya
• Hiten Shah
• Evan Walden
• Joe Walsh

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

13 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

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