Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang explains his “MEI” hiring policy

In June of 2024, Alexandr announced a new hiring policy called MEI, which stands for merit, excellence, and intelligence.

“The basic idea is in every role we’re going to hire the best possible person, regardless of their demographics. And we’re not going to do any sort of quota-based optimization of our workforce to meet certain demographic targets.”

He continues:

“That doesn’t mean we don’t care about diversity. We actually care about having diverse pipelines and diverse top-of-funnel for all of our roles. But at the end of the day, the best, most capable person for every job is going to be the one that we hire.”

Alexandr acknowledges that this was mildly controversial, and there are legitimate questions about how much social responsibility companies should bear. But overall his philosophy seems to echo the ideas popularized by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong of building a “mission-focused company.” Brian put it this way in a 2020 blog post:

“It has become common for Silicon Valley companies to engage in a wide variety of social activism, even those unrelated to what the company does, and there are certainly employees who really want this in the company they work for. So why have we decided to take a different approach? The reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division. […] Even if we all agree that something is a problem, we may not agree on how to actually go solve it […] Change happens in the world only when a smart, talented, group of people come together to focus on a hard problem for a decade or more. Many companies never stand the test of time, because they decide to dabble in unrelated efforts, and distract and divide their workforce in the process. Paradoxically, by being laser focused on our mission, we will likely have an even greater impact on the world, through our products and growing customer base.”

Video source: @a16z (2024)