Ex‑OpenAI Product Chief Says The Key To Building Success Is Gathering ‘A Team Of Avengers,’ Reveals Two Traits To Look Out For

Former OpenAI vice president Peter Deng says the secret to shipping hit products is assembling “a team of Avengers,” not a squad of interchangeable generalists.

What Happened: Speaking on Lenny’s Podcast in June, Deng said leaders should “think about your team as a product and what are the various pieces you need to really stretch the gamut of what you’re thinking about.”

He likened recruiting to an RPG where “everyone has different sliders and you have to create this super team where everyone actually spikes in different ways.”

Deng, now a general partner at Felicis Ventures, helped craft ChatGPT Enterprise, Facebook Messenger and Uber Reserve before leaving OpenAI earlier this year. Across those launches, he said the standout groups paired wildly different “superpowers,” a pattern he believes beats homogeneous crews every time.

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“The teams that I’ve helped build are — the most successful ones are a team of Avengers that are just very different, have very different superpowers,” he says. “You know you’re getting the best outcome when everyone’s pulling and obsessing over a different thing,” Deng adds.

Why It Matters: The ex‑OpenAI product chief scouts two traits above all — autonomy and a “growth mindset.” “In six months, if I’m telling you what to do, I hired the wrong person,” Deng explains, arguing that self‑directed staff drive higher standards.

The Avengers model Deng talks about echoes broader Silicon Valley moves to swap “full‑stack” generalists for deep specialists as AI workloads splinter into safety, alignment and enterprise verticals. Deng contends that mix is what kept pace at Meta and OpenAI.

While Deng recommends managers and CEOs have a mix of team players, in a 1995 interview, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said the single biggest lever in tech is staffing teams exclusively with “A players,” insisting the performance gap between good and great software talent can reach 50‑to‑1. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has since endorsed Jobs’s mantra, adding that only a tight roster of top‑tier performers can consistently outclass much larger teams of average contributors.

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