One of Ramp’s best engineers paid his way through college by running a Minecraft server. Not playing on one. Running one: infrastructure, mods, moderators, payments, customers. He built a real business before he was old enough to drive.
For most of the last twenty years, standard career advice had one thing to say about that kind of story: leave it off. Games are not professional. A candy-bar resale empire is not experience. Nobody cares that you were the neighborhood’s entire IT department at thirteen. So people scrubbed the most interesting things they had ever done off their profiles and replaced them with the same beige bullet points as everyone else.
Here is the fun part: the people doing the hiring have started saying the opposite, out loud, on the record. Think of your job history as the main quest. It matters, but everyone’s main quest looks pretty similar. The side quests are where you picked up the rare skills. This is a guide to putting them back on the map.
The people doing the hiring changed their minds
“I’m less interested in what is the résumé. I’m far more interested in proof of work.”
Eric Glyman, CEO of Ramp, July 2026
That is the CEO of a company valued in the tens of billions, on the David Senra podcast, as reported by Fortune. And he was not being theoretical. Ramp found an entire community of engineers because, as teenagers, they had spent 80 to 100 hours a week building and monetizing private Minecraft servers. The company recruits from GitHub and goes looking, in Glyman’s words, for “people who were leaders in different bizarre fringe communities.”
His co-founder Karim Atiyeh describes the same philosophy as hiring for “spikiness”: one clear superpower beats checking ten boxes. He compares it to assembling the Avengers. Sam Altman has a version of the same idea: hire for slope, not y-intercept. Where you are headed beats where you started.
And this is not one company’s quirk:
- Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, hires through real paid trial projects. CEO Matt Mullenweg wrote a Harvard Business Review essay titled, literally, “Hire by Auditions, Not Resumes.” The work decides.
- Susquehanna, one of the world’s biggest trading firms, teaches its traders poker and runs a firm-wide tournament, because making good bets under uncertainty is the actual job.
- Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, a lifelong StarCraft player, once offered a pro gamer a job on the strength of his in-game reputation.
Why now? AI made generic polish free, so the signals that cannot be generated in eight seconds, like years of commits, a community that actually runs, or a business you built at fifteen, are the signals that still mean something. We wrote about that shift in our LinkedIn guide.
One honest note: we are living in the messy middle. Harvard researchers found that for all the loud talk of skills-based hiring, it actually changed fewer than one in every 700 hires last year. The old system is fading and the new one is arriving, and you have to build for both. So keep your standard work experience clean and legible; that is the bridge that gets you read. Then let the surprising stuff set you apart, because when ten applicants have the same title, the raid team and the rabbit LLC are what people remember.
You were not wasting time. You were building proof.
Which kid were you?
Four hidden-skill profiles we see all the time on Ground Floor. Tap yours, and see what you were actually building.
The Gamer
The old advice“Nobody wants to see games on a résumé.”
Here is what the research actually says. A 2024 peer-reviewed University of Houston study of employed adults who were serious online gamers found the skills they built in game showed up at work: team leadership, coaching, problem-solving, confidence. The lead author put it plainly: gaming “often gets a bad reputation, but” it can “help people develop valuable workplace skills.”
The world already trusts gamer hands on serious controls, too. The US Navy swapped $38,000 periscope handgrips for $30 Xbox controllers on its submarines. The Army has driven bomb-disposal robots with game controllers for over 15 years. The Boring Company ran part of a tunnel-boring machine on one. If you ever led a raid team, you ran recruiting, scheduling, coaching, and retention for a volunteer workforce that could quit at any moment. That is management. Say so.
The Hustler
The old advice“Cute story. Not experience.”
Ramp’s CEO describes that Minecraft engineer as having become “a small-businessperson when he was, quite literally, very small.” That is the modern read. The king-size candy bars, the water bottles at baseball games, the essay-editing operation: those were small businesses, with pricing, supply, customers, and competition. (Don’t worry. We will not tell your middle school.)
The drive shows up early and it lasts. A study following 6,116 people from birth found that entrepreneurial intentions at 16 predicted actually becoming an entrepreneur by 34. And the far end of this curve is genuinely wild: George Mack points to Cole Summers, who set up an LLC at age 7 breeding rabbits for local restaurants, then bought and flipped a house at 10.
The Odd-Jobber
The old advice“That is not a real job.”
Every neighborhood has one: the kid who mowed the lawns, fixed the wifi, painted the fence, jumped the dead battery. If that was you, you have more work experience than your résumé gives you credit for. You found customers. You showed up on time. You solved problems you had never seen before, in other people’s houses, with an audience. And you got invited back, which is the oldest performance review there is.
That is precisely the profile early-stage founders are desperate for: someone who sees a problem and just handles it. The only thing missing is that you never wrote it down.
The Weird-Hobbyist
The old advice“Keep it professional. Delete the weird thing.”
George Mack keeps a running list of ways to spot high-agency people. Number one is weird teenage hobbies. His reasoning: “Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.”
His High Agency handbook is full of the contradictions he loves: “The boxer who writes poetry. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don’t line up with their stereotypes, they’ve exercised agency.” Your unusual thing is not noise on your profile. It is the highest-signal line on it. And there is a decent chance the person reading it has a weird hobby too.
Not one of these four? The same playbook works for whatever your version is: nonprofit and volunteer work, running the community fundraiser, coaching a team, moderating a forum, caregiving. If it took initiative and other people counted on you, it counts.
How to put it back on your profile
Three rules keep this from swinging too far into “my hobbies ARE my personality” territory.
- Give it numbers. Scale is what turns weird into legible. “40-person raid team,” “$80 a week,” “three years,” “12,000-member Discord.” A number tells a stranger this was real.
- Translate the skill, keep the story. Name the workplace skill right next to the colorful part. The story makes you memorable; the translation makes you hireable. You need both halves.
- Lead with it, don’t bury it. The weird thing belongs in your About as part of your throughline, not hidden at the bottom under Interests. It is a hook, not a footnote.
For the full profile playbook, including what the AI screeners can and cannot read, start with our guide to optimizing your LinkedIn for humans and AI agents.
Now tell us about your server
This is exactly how we read applications at Ground Floor. The talent collective application has a field for links to things you have built, side projects very much included. When founders ask us for people who figure things out, we go looking for the server-runners and the candy-bar kids.
Join the Ground Floor talent collectiveThe kid who paid for college with a Minecraft server did not get lucky. The market caught up to his side quest. It is catching up to yours, too.