Yoni Tserruya is the co-founder and CEO of Lusha, the AI-powered sales intelligence platform used by millions of sales and RevOps professionals, processing over a billion data points daily. He scaled Lusha from a simple Chrome extension in 2016 to a global team of 300+ employees, then intentionally shrunk the team twice in the last year to force AI adoption and get profitable. In this episode, Yoni breaks down why hiring experienced executives from big companies was his biggest mistake, how he embeds "builders" inside every department, and the counterintuitive hiring filter he now uses in the AI era.
What you'll learn:
- Why Yoni shrunk his team twice in one year and ships faster than ever with fewer people
- The "builder inside every department" framework that turned marketing, finance, and HR into AI-powered teams
-Why hiring executives from big companies backfired and what he looks for instead
- The exact moment scaling broke his management style (hint: the 150-to-300 jump)
- How constraints force AI adoption better than any top-down mandate
- Why "hungry" beats "been there, done that" when no one has built the role before
- The eagle metaphor Yoni uses to identify leaders who can both manage and build
- How he runs team meetings across four hierarchy levels to kill bottlenecks
Chapters:
00:00 Why you can't hire someone who's "done it before" with AI
00:53 Meet Yoni Tserruya, CEO of Lusha
01:30 Adopting AI across every department, not just engineering
02:45 Why every team needs a builder embedded inside it
03:33 Shrinking the team twice to force speed and AI adoption
04:35 The painful jump from 150 to 300 employees
06:20 How constraints unlock creativity and AI adoption
12:21 The hiring mistake: big-company executives who can't build
13:30 Finding leaders who can manage AND drill down
16:16 Culture you can't fake and full founder mode
18:26 Killing hierarchy without killing structure
24:00 Hybrid vs. in-office and when each actually works
30:11 Core values: build, measure, learn, delete, transparency
31:22 Hiring for curiosity, hunger, and fast learning
32:55 Why the role must be the best job the hire has ever had
Where to find Yoni:
Yoni Tserruya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoni-tserruya/
Lusha: https://www.lusha.com
Where to find Luiz Cent:
Website: https://latamcent.com/
Who We Hire: https://whowehire.org/
