People Outlast Companies

Great companies understand that leadership isn’t just about individual output. It’s about impact at scale. When you hire a strong design leader, engineering lead, or product executive, you’re not just getting their experience. You’re gaining access to a trusted network they’ve built over years: engineers they collaborate well with, product managers they’ve shipped with, and designers they’ve mentored and grown. That network is an accelerant. It enables fast trust, faster delivery, and fewer hiring mistakes.

Some of the smartest leaders I know do this explicitly. They don’t just have a network. They curate one. They know which people they trust, how to activate them, and when to bring them in. The most effective leaders I’ve seen are gravitational. Their orbit is full of high-accountability, high-talent people who follow them from company to company. When you work with people who consistently build great things, you want to keep building with them.

Smart Leaders Curate Their Networks

Everyone has a network. LinkedIn ensures that. But what sets great leaders apart is how they maintain and curate that network. They aren’t just collecting names, they’re identifying key people to keep around. They observe not only who performs, but how they operate: their values, their resilience under pressure, their ability to navigate ambiguity.

I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand. Some of the best leaders I know are talent magnets. People follow them from one company to another because they’ve built trust and achieved success together. It’s not unusual to see a designer or engineer follow a leader across multiple roles, sometimes even years apart, because they know they work well together.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this in practice is my friend Alberto Silveira. He’s now a CTO for top tech company in the Carlyle portfolio, but his network began forming decades ago when he was a junior engineer starting his career at IBM in Brazil. Over the course of nearly a dozen roles, he’s brought a core group of trusted collaborators with him, including people so impactful that he helped them move from Brazil to the US, just so they could be on his team. These are people he’s seen deliver under pressure, across disciplines, over and over again. A couple of them even used to manage him back in the day. That’s the power of long-term trust: roles evolve, but the trust carries through. Today I may be hiring, and tomorrow you may be hiring. I'll work for you, you'll work for me. What matters is we know we'll win together, because we've done it before.

Alberto wrote a book on the subject called Building and Managing High-Performance Distributed Teams, where he outlines his Iron Triangle framework: product, design, and engineering working in sync. It’s the kind of system that only works when built on deep cross-functional trust, and it explains why his network continues to show up, role after role. They know they'll be working not only with good engineers, but also designers and product managers that have been proven out through Alberto's network. This results in a sort of transferred trust, whereby each individual knows they're not just getting a good leader in Alberto; they're also getting good teammates that he vetted through the same process as them. "If they're good enough for Alberto, they're good enough for me."

The PayPal Mafia is another classic example. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and others not only built PayPal together - they went on to build Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, and Yammer with many of the same people. HubSpot has its own version. When David Cancel left to found Drift, he brought a tight group of trusted operators and designers from HubSpot with him. These weren’t friends; they were proven builders. At Google, Sameer Samat brought in key people from his previous startups to lead across Android and Chrome. These leaders don’t just scale through their own ideas and labor. They scale through others.

Cross-Functional Orbits Are Powerful

Design leaders often talk about building strong design teams. But the best ones go further. They think laterally. They remember which engineers elevated the work, which product managers drove clarity and momentum, and which cross-functional partners made the team better. They maintain those relationships, and they bring them along.

This has been true in my own career. When I think about who I want to work with again, I don’t just think of designers. I think of engineers who understand design deeply, who collaborate in Figma, who care about the details. I think of product managers who respect process, defend quality, and push scope in the right ways. That’s how you scale as a design leader. Not by replicating yourself, but by surrounding yourself with proven operators across disciplines.

The result is, when a good design leader enters a company, they're not just thinking about what designers to bring along. They're thinking about who to pair those designers with cross-functionally. They may know of an engineer that works well with the rockstar designer they're going to hire; they'll go after them as a pair. Or a PM that isn't afraid to take some principled risk; maybe they can attract a top designer if they're able to say that person is on board. Good design leaders will quietly build full stack teams. Sure, they'll hire designers. But they'll also be there serving up engineering talent to the engineering organization, and product talent to the product organization, and so on. Rinse and repeat until they have a stacked team that they know can get the job done.

Why Networked Leadership Works

When leaders bring known collaborators with them, they unlock:

• Predictability: You know what someone brings to the table because you’ve seen it before.

• Efficiency: You can skip the onboarding curve and get straight to execution.

• Balanced Skill Sets: You can assemble balanced teams with complementary skill sets and temperaments.

• Risk: Your likelihood of making a hiring error is much lower with known individuals.

• Trust: You don’t have to establish credibility from scratch because it already exists.

• Speed: Decisions and iteration cycles move faster with shared context.

• Resilience: You’ve seen how these people respond under pressure and you can count on them again.

Performance, Not Proximity

I do want to be clear, this isn’t about hiring your friends. And it’s not about talent poaching. This is about trust and track record. It’s about people you’ve built with, struggled with, shipped with. People who’ve shown you, repeatedly, that they can deliver.

These relationships often evolve across years. You might work together at one company, then reconnect at another five years later. It’s not always immediate or linear. But it’s something you can deliberately cultivate. And if you do, it becomes a powerful strategy for career growth. You're no longer just an individual; you are your network.

Build your network with intention. Maintain it. And when the time is right, activate it. That doesn’t mean offering jobs to friends. It means keeping a mental map of who delivers, who complements you, and who makes the work better.

It also means making yourself someone others want to carry forward. Be the kind of collaborator people want in their orbit.

A Shared Connection

Here’s a quick story. For years, Alberto would tell me about one of the best designers he'd ever worked with. This was someone who set the bar for collaboration, ownership, and execution. Meanwhile, I had a designer on my team at Square who I considered one of the best I’d ever worked with. We spoke about these people often and would trade notes on what it meant to be a good designer.

One day, when Alberto was looking to hire a design leader at his company, I thought of that designer I had worked with at Square. She had left the company and would be a perfect fit for his role. I opened her LinkedIn profile to send it to him, and saw that she had once worked at the same company as Alberto in the past. That’s when I realized we had been talking about the same person all along, but at different points in her career.

Her name is Hannah. She’s the kind of designer that becomes a reference point. So much so that she was the person both Alberto and I independently referred to when thinking of an exemplary designer, without even realizing we were both talking about the same person. That’s not a coincidence. The design industry is small, and great talent stands out. When you find those people, you don't forget them or let them go.

People Outlast Companies

Products come and go. Roadmaps shift. Reorgs happen. But the people who deliver, and the trust you build with them - that’s what endures.

When you invest in people, you’re investing in your future orbit. And when companies hire you, that’s what they’re getting: not just your output, but the force multiplier of the people you bring with you.

The work changes. The people stay. Because people outlast companies.