We support meritocracy.

Today we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale. We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. This is the email I’ve shared with our @scale_AI team.

1/ It's been about a year since my mission-focused blog post. It wasn't easy to go through at the time, but looking back, it turned out to be one of the most positive changes I've made at Coinbase, and I'd recommend it to others.

Merit should be the only reason for hiring, especially for jobs where your family’s lives are at stake

The implication that women or minorities need anything other than an even playing field to compete and win on merit has always been insulting, and I'm glad everyone can now say it out loud.

Meritocracy is our strength.

Merit - and its associated virtue, competence - solves a large % of the problems facing our civilization, improving millions of lives. The most important policy battles are not right/left, they are around merit vs virtue-signal and competence vs incompetence!

Bold leadership from Alexandr Wang. "Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale."

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

An idea meritocracy—a system that brings together smart, independent thinkers and has them productively dis-agree to come up with the best possible collective thinking & resolve their disagreements in a believability-weighted way—will outperform any other decision-making system.

If we want America to remain the world's greatest meritocracy, a place where the American dream isn't defined by class or color, then educational institutions must lead the way.

Well said! As an immigrant who overcame financial insecurity, I know how attractive a true meritocracy is to anyone underrepresented. True meritocracy also begets diversity. Just beware implicit bias.

Meritocracy was one of our core values at Zynga.

So proud of Alexandr and Scale's stance here. Merit, excellence and intelligence is the path forward. Tokenization by race and gender is disrespectful, bad, and a long term losing strategy.

Startup tip: you’re not required to have DEI. Firing this team will immediately save costs and improve performance.

Gradually then suddenly. Have a read of the comments here. The industry has moved on. Good job, @alexandr_wang.

Let’s keep it a buck; startups don’t have the time or resources to spend on DEI efforts—even if they want to! It’s always been merit, what you can afford, and who’s willing to take the absurd risk of working for a company with an average of just six months of runway!

We have never given preference to any candidate at @River because of their gender or ethnicity and we never will. We hire purely for intelligence/skill and culture fit. Glad to see this mindset is finally becoming the norm.

It’s crazy that we’re living in a world where it requires bravery to say your hiring principles are based on: merit, excellence and intelligence. But that’s the world we’re in. Kudos to @alexandr_wang for being principled.

Based. Good work making it clear, Alex.

Powerful and persuasive, bravo.

Flexport hires and promotes based on people’s ability to contribute to our mission.

I'd predict the entire list of companies hiring on here will consistently outpace the S&P 500. Obsessing over anything besides merit will prove to be unwise.

DEI is over. Time to return to meritocracy in both education and hiring.

Scale is the fastest growing startup in the world right now and they’ve coined a new acronym for hiring, MEI: Merit, Excellence and Intelligence. Kudos ⁦@alexandr_wang — "No group has a monopoly on excellence"

So relieved to finally say it out loud, Delightree does not have a special place for women **just** because I'm a female founder. It has, and will always be, a place where merit is rewarded above everything else.

Hopefully merit-based hiring serves as a feasible alternative to DEI, and we let the market sort out which method should prosper.

For the hardest tasks, one needs to seek the best talent for the job, regardless of background. Meritocratic competition is how one finds talent/task fit the fastest. Latter is imperative to create and scale great products & services that provide greater benefits for all.

Our ethos at @hackerrank right from the beginning has always been skills over pedigree. Although, it sounds obvious, there’s still a long way to go. Glad to see this voice being echoed by great leaders and proud to say that Scale is one of our customers as well!