Arthur Matuszewski on the cost of playing it safe in hiring
What if your biggest hiring mistakes aren’t who you hire — but who you don’t?
In this episode of 10x Recruiting, Arthur Matuszewski (Managing Partner at Carrara, ex-Bridgewater & Better) unpacks the high cost of false negatives in hiring — the exceptional people who slip through the cracks because they don’t fit the usual mold. He shares how Bridgewater tracked its “hiring anti-portfolio” to learn from the candidates they rejected who went on to do extraordinary things, and why your talent strategy should be built around maximizing upside, not minimizing risk.
Arthur and Nolan get into how to build more intellectually honest organizations, why pedigree is a poor proxy for performance, and what it means to truly focus on the work.
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Key takeaways:
- Most teams play defense in hiring. Arthur Matuszewski (ex-Bridgewater, Better, founder of Carrara) makes the case for prioritizing upside over “safety” in hiring by building systems that surface exceptional potential.
- Rigor beats instincts. Arthur argues that smart hiring requires constant assumption-checking. Talent leaders should focus less on being right and more on staying honest — and updating fast.
- There’s no universal playbook. At Carrara, Arthur helps early-stage companies start with context: What work actually needs to get done? The answers shape everything else.
“The only safety that you really have is in being able to bet on yourself. It’s not Bridgewater that made those people great. It was their ability to make themselves great within Bridgewater. And I think that's something that's thankfully stayed with me.” — Arthur Matuszewski
In recruiting, there’s endless talk about hiring the best. But what if the real differentiator isn’t the candidate themselves but how honestly we assess the value they create?
That’s the theme of a recent episode of 10x Recruiting, where host Nolan Church sits down with Arthur Matuszewski, who’s helped companies like Bridgewater, Wayfair, and Better.com build high-performance teams. Now, as the founder of Carrara, he works with early-stage companies at inflection points — helping them align talent strategy with business reality.
In this conversation, Arthur unpacks what intellectual honesty looks like in hiring, why some of the best candidates get overlooked, and how to focus on the work — not the resume.
The real risk isn’t hiring the wrong person — it’s missing the right one
Most recruiting teams obsess over false positives: bad hires who shouldn’t have made it through. Arthur’s approach is the opposite.
“We were more concerned about the false negatives than the false positives,” he says of his time at Bridgewater. “We tried to study the cases where we didn’t hire someone — or couldn’t unlock their potential — and they went on to do amazing things.”
This mindset is a major shift from the traditional recruiting playbook. Rather than aiming for safety and predictability, Arthur prioritized maximizing upside. His team even studied their “hiring anti-portfolio,” a retrospective on the candidates they passed over who later created outsize impact elsewhere.
The implication: Great hiring doesn’t come from eliminating every risk. It comes from building a system that helps exceptional talent reveal itself — and then acting decisively when it does.
Individual brilliance isn’t enough
Arthur learned this lesson early at Bridgewater. The company had a habit of hiring exceptionally smart people and then struggling to make it work.
“We spent all this time trying to identify individual exceptions. We brought those folks together, and at the end of the day, we still struggled to make things make sense,” he says. “The sum of the whole is not always greater than its parts — especially when the work is confusing, and you’re not focused on what will move the needle forward.”
One example of this? Hiring Fulbrights as executive assistants.
“When you’re trying to schedule a meeting, you don’t want people debating the nature of time,” Arthur says. “You want people to just schedule the meeting.”
It’s a powerful reminder that hiring isn’t about collecting stars. It’s about building a team that works — and that starts with clarity on what the work actually requires.
Great talent cultures run on experimentation — and brutal honesty
Bridgewater’s culture of experimentation was an operating system as much as it was a quirk. Everything was built to reduce human error and improve decision-making quality — including tools that collected team members’ real-time performance feedback.
But Arthur cautions that this approach only works when it's tied to business strategy.
“Experimentation is easier to do if you have a national research budget,” he says. “That's not true for most businesses.”
This is why intellectual honesty — not just experimentation — became the real competitive advantage. “If you’re out there ‘talking a book’ and shilling whatever the ideas of the day are, and you're not actually updating and holding yourself to task about whether or not these things actually work … that's where you can sometimes get led astray.”
Honesty of this caliber requires detaching from sunk costs, ego, and identity. It’s not about being right. It’s about getting to the right answer.
Hiring isn’t all about vibes. It’s about value.
For years, companies operated under a comforting illusion: focus on people, and the work will take care of itself.
Arthur pushes back on this assumption. He explains that this was by and large true in an age when excess returns on technological creation outweighed the carrying costs of lower-lift jobs, but this era is over.
Today, titles, tenure, and name-brand logos are less important than demonstrable output. “You’re increasingly only as good as the points you put on the board,” Arthur says. “It’s a lot harder to just sit in an organization and hide.”
This shift demands a different kind of rigor. Recruiters need to show their work—not just during the interview process, but every day. That means tracking what gets done, synthesizing outcomes, and aligning activity with real business progress.
Arthur puts it simply: “What you're paid for is generating momentum for aligning direction.” And if you’re not, people will notice.
Carrara’s approach: Start with demand, not supply
At Carrara, Arthur helps founders build high-performance teams by starting with the work — not the resume.
“What’s successful at Bridgewater isn’t what’s successful at Better, isn’t what’s successful in babysitting,” he says. “We're focused not on just bringing the best supply to the yard but really indexing more heavily on demand.”
This demand-side focus helps founders uncover what success actually looks like in their unique environment. Sometimes, it means ignoring conventional playbooks. Other times, it means pushing founders to confront their own assumptions.
“You’re not trying to win the argument,” Arthur says. “You’re here to get to truth.”
What talent leaders can take away
Arthur’s message is simple: Focus on the work. Be ruthlessly honest. Optimize for upside, not “safety.” And stop hiding behind credentials when output is what really matters.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
- Fix your false negative problem: Study the people you passed on who went on to win. What did you miss?
- Be skeptical of brilliance: Hiring the smartest person doesn’t matter if they can’t get the job done in your environment.
- Detach your ego: Your idea is not your identity. Let go fast when the data tells you to.
- Build judgment with data: Don’t default to gut feel. Use evidence to inform your hiring bets.
- Center the work: What are you actually hiring someone to do? Focus there and build around that.
As Arthur explained, success doesn’t come from a company making its team members valuable. It comes from the team members’ ability to make themselves valuable within the company.
Great talent systems do the same. They create the conditions for people to rise — and get out of the way when they do.
