The best resume I ever received was one line long.

An 18-year-old kid who was always quiet on Twitter. I asked him to send me his resume. He replied with one line: "I can build anything in Solidity." I hired him as an intern on the spot.

I think about that DM a lot, because it sums up how I've built my team. I've ended up with what I honestly believe is one of the best sets of Web3 developers at any Indian crypto startup, maybe any on this side of the world, and almost none of them would have made it through a normal hiring process.

My engineering manager is someone I met on Clubhouse. We'd had these long, deep conversations in rooms about crypto late at night, and at some point I realised I'd already interviewed him a dozen times without either of us knowing it. Another engineer, I gave an assignment to see what he could do. He delivered the whole stack within 24 hours. He barely had a resume either.

They're misfits, most of them. They came from very different places, a lot of them didn't have the marks or the college names, and some of them had never shipped anything to a real user. What they had instead was restlessness. They'd been hacking on side projects at 2am, reading smart contracts for fun, asking questions in Discord servers nobody else was reading. You could see it in the first conversation. They didn't want a job. They wanted a shot.

I never had the pedigree myself. I didn't crack IIT, I went to whichever college would take me, and years later a couple of the IIT and IIM grads I grew up comparing myself to ended up working under me. CVs lie in both directions. So I recognise the hunger when I see it.

Hiring them was the easy part. The hard part is what comes after, which is actually trusting them.

It's very easy, as a founder who's scared of dropping the ball, to hand someone a tiny ticket and then check it three times. The moment you do that, the hunger goes out of them, because you've told them, without saying it, that you don't really believe in them. So I try to do the opposite. I put people in front of problems slightly too big for them - a whole minting flow, a client integration, a feature a brand is going to announce to millions of people - and stay close enough to catch them if they fall, but far enough that they feel it's theirs. Most of the time they rise to it faster than I'd have believed. People who'd never spoken to a client are running calls with brand teams a few months later.

And sometimes the thing you do for people isn't even a hire.

About four months after I moved back to Bangalore, I got a message from someone I didn't recognise. He said, "Hey Dhruva, just so you know, I'm working at a crypto company now, and my journey started in one of your Clubhouse rooms months ago. I don't know if you'd even remember me, but thank you." He'd sat in on one of those late-night sessions where I talked about crypto and NFTs to whoever showed up, gone off and learned more on his own, built things himself, and landed a job.

I didn't remember him. I'd never kept count of those rooms. And that message made my whole month.

That's the butterfly effect of small things. You say something useful to a room of strangers, you give an 18-year-old a shot because of one line in a DM, and you never know which of those seeds is going to grow. Most of them you'll never hear about. But you do right by them, you take care of them, and some of them weather the storm.

So if you're hiring and you can't afford experience, don't apologise for it. Look for the hunger, give it something real to chew on, and then get out of the way.

They'll outgrow you. That's the point.