43,802 candidates. Fifteen introductions. One platform engineer.

Honcho sits close to the metal of how AI products get built, so Vince needed a platform engineer who treats reliability and scale as first-class problems, and who fits a self-taught, high-agency culture.

Wellfound produced a firehose of irrelevant inbound. The people they wanted were rare and not on job boards, and Vince had no time to sift the internet for them while building the product.

On the kickoff call Vince said "autodidact". The agent asked what that means in practice: people who write up their learning in public, replicate papers, ship side projects that show how they think. Taste became criteria it could search for.

It then crawled beyond LinkedIn. For the person Plastic Labs hired, it linked a conventional profile to a personal site documenting a new language he was learning and essays about music. None of that was on his resume.

Fifteen candidates reached Vince, each already contacted, interested, and annotated with why they matched. Structured interviews, an offer, and a hire inside five weeks.

Every gap that opens at Plastic Labs now starts with Superposition.