Hiring in 2026 : Surat edition

Hiring is one of the hardest things a founder does, and it looks quite different going into 2026. AI has reshaped what a lot of roles actually involve, small teams are shipping what much larger ones used to, and the way founders find, evaluate, and keep people is being rewritten as they go. This is a candid conversation with founders and the people who hire for them on how they are building teams right now. Which roles they are still hiring for and which ones they have quietly stopped hiring for. Where they find good people when every job post draws hundreds of AI written applications. How they run interviews when candidates have the same tools they do. It also gets into the parts that are rarely discussed openly: what to pay an early hire, when equity actually makes sense and when it just confuses people, how to bring in your first senior person when you have never managed one, and what makes someone stay once the early excitement wears off. The format is open and primarily driven by audience questions, so come with the hiring problem you are actually stuck on. Whether you are about to make your first hire or your thirtieth, you leave with inputs from people solving the same thing in Surat.