That guy? Paul Graham.

From http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html -

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

Something got lost in that one sentence synopsis. He wasn't suggesting that you dehumanize your employees by literally thinking of them as animals.