How to Hire Your First Engineer

Harj Taggar</a> is cofounder and CEO of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://triplebyte.com//">Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.\n<hr />\nThis post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer. At this stage traditional recruiting methods e.g. hiring a recruiter won’t work as well for you as they do for larger companies.\nHiring your first engineer at a startup is incredibly hard. As a founder you’re already stretched dangerously thin on time. There are bugs to fix, customers to close and any number of urgent existential fires that demand your full attention. You know you should be spending more time on hiring but it’s a battle to find it.\nThe bad news is even once you find the time, much of it will feel like wasted effort. Hiring isn’t the kind of work that provides you constant dopamine hits. It involves a lot of dead ends and frustration.\nStart by being clear on what exactly you’re looking for. I’d recommend listing all the specific criteria your dream hire would have. This will be a combination of technical (are they a good engineer?) and non technical (would I work productively with them?). Then mark each candidate you interview against all these criteria and rigorously debate if you think they have enough strengths in some areas to make up for weaknesses in others.\nIn practice hiring decisions invariably involve tradeoffs. You could trade quality for speed by rejecting solid candidates to wait for the dream one. Or you could trade money for time by paying a candidate above market rate to join now. Founders should be aware of all these tradeoffs and make the one that’s best for your circumstances.\nOnce you know what you’re looking for, you’re ready to start finding candidates. I’ll go through the strategies available, starting with what I believe is most effective and working through to the least.\nNote: As the founder of a hiring platform I’m not neutral in discussing their effectiveness. I have articulated both their advantages and disadvantages and we did make our own first engineering hire through <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://triplebyte.com//">Triplebyte.

Personal Networks</h2>\nThis is the most important source by far. Once your startup scales it’ll become less important as you’ll have more budget to spend on recruiting tools and building a recruiting team. At the start though it’s where you should exclusively focus your energy and only consider other sources when you’ve exhausted all possibilities here.\nHiring someone you’ve already worked with is your best option because you already know if you’ll like working with them. How much you enjoy working with any single person matters less as you grow larger but for your first hire it could be the difference between persevering to success and shutting down the company. (Caveat: startups are also uniquely stressful environments and there’s still some probability you might not enjoy working with your friend under this kind of stress as much as when you were both at a bigger company).\nYou’ll also have a better chance to convince someone you know to take a risk and join you. Asking anyone to join as your first hire is asking for an order of magnitude greater commitment than pitching an investor to invest. With personal connections you’ll know what would most motivate them to join and you can lean on friends to help convince them to make the leap.\nYet I’m surprised by how often founders don’t fully explore their personal networks for hiring. It’s easy to be quick in assuming that none of your friends are available before even asking them. It’s understandable. Asking your friends to leave their jobs and take a risk with you is scary. It’s also more awkward to be rejected by your friends than strangers. Still, if you’re optimizing for the success of your startup you’ll have to put this aside. Here’s a plan you could follow:\n<ol>\n<li>\nMake a list of the best engineers you know, whether you think they’re available or not. Go through your Facebook and LinkedIn to jog your memory.\n</li>\n<li>\nInvite them to lunch or dinner with them to talk about your startup.\n</li>\n<li>\nMake the ask – would you consider joining us?.\n</li>\n<li>\nWhatever they answer, ask a follow up question – if you did join us, which engineers would you most want to hire?.\n</li>\n<li>\nAsk for an introduction to those people.\n</li>\n<li>\nRepeat 2 – 5 with each of the introductions.\n</li>\n<li>\nRepeat 1 – 6 ad infinitum, I know public company founders who still do this. Expect to be spending at least a third of your time on this alone.\n</li>\n</ol>\nFor your first three engineering hires I’d recommend focusing exclusively on personal network hiring. As your team grows though you’ll start thinking more about the composition and diversity of your team. Hiring through your personal network usually isn’t the best option for this and the larger a team grows the harder it becomes to change the balance. After your first three hires, I’d suggest continue to work your personal network and supplementing with the strategies below to meet candidates your own network wouldn’t reach.\n<h2>Hiring Marketplaces</h2>\nNewer recruiting startups like us (Triplebyte) and Hired operate as marketplaces. There’s candidates on one side and companies on the other. The value to candidates is increasing their number of options and to companies it’s reducing their time to make hires.\nThese marketplaces are strictly inferior to using personal networks for your first hire. The good ones can attract high quality candidates but most will want to work somewhere that already has an engineering team. They also charge a fee per hire that will usually be around $25,000 for an experienced engineer. Whether that’s good value for you depends on how much funding you’ve raised and how much founder time you’d have to spend on making that hire.\nCandidates on these marketplaces are also speaking with multiple companies so you’ll face competition. You can get success though (we’ve had startups make their first hire on Triplebyte). Your results will depend heavily on how effective your pitch and closing process is. I’ve seen a lot of variance in how effective companies are at this. An engineer hired at <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://gusto.com//">Gusto (YC W12) through Triplebyte <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://kellysutton.com/2016/10/20/visualizing-a-job-search-or-how-to-find-a-job-as-a-software-engineer.html/">blogged about how much difference there is between companies in just being responsive to him. To get the most from a hiring marketplace you need a polished pitch for why your company is an exciting place to work and a speedy process for moving them from first call to interview and offer.\nDespite the disadvantages I still rank (good) hiring marketplaces as your second best option because they provide quick access to a pool of vetted, skilled engineers. The candidates on these marketplaces are mostly motivated to move jobs right now. You can quickly get on the phone to make your pitch and start interviewing the interested ones. This also helps you practice and improve both your pitch and calibration on what exactly you’re looking for. Getting better at pitching will increase your success at hiring in general.\nSome of the marketplaces will also do a rigorous technical evaluation of the candidates before accepting them onto the marketplace. If that evaluation is done well, you can skip your own pre-onsite technical screening and expect a higher conversion rate of onsite interviews to offer which saves you time. (The average direct to onsite to offer rate for Triplebyte candidates is 40% vs the industry standard of 20%).\n<h2>Generate Inbound</h2>\nAs an early stage startup you likely won’t get much organic inbound interest from good engineers. The quickest way to generate this is posting on job sites. However most job sites aren’t frequented by high-quality engineers. They’ll get you volume, not quality and volume alone isn’t what you want. The majority of job applicants for any job posting are below the bar and it creates more work for you to filter them. The job postings I would recommend trying are on sites with a sizable engineering audience e.g. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/">Stack Overflow Jobs</a>, the monthly Hacker News <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17442187\%22>%e2%80%9cWho is hiring?”</a> thread (Hacker News job postings themselves are only available to YC companies) and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://angel.co/recruiting/">Angel List</a>.\nYou can also create content that appeals to engineers to generate inbound interest. This is especially easy if you’re working on a particularly exciting idea e.g. self-driving cars. As soon as you publicly announce what you’re doing you’ll get a burst of inbound applications. As this type of startup you’ll always have a hiring advantage by having an easier time getting press and building brand recognition.\nDeveloper tool companies also have an advantage. Your product is already interesting to engineers and you should be investing in writing good quality blog posts about it – both to attract customers and for hiring. Set a goal of writing an article that’s Hacker News front page worthy at least once a month.\nIf you’re not either of these types of companies you can still blog about the technical choices you’ve made. Have you made any controversial or unusual choices in your stack? If so, write about them. You may alienate some engineers who disagree but you may also capture the full attention of a few who agree strongly e.g. Cognito have especially strong views on testing and wrote about how they use mutation testing (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.cognitohq.com/how-to-write-better-code-using-mutation-testing//">https://blog.cognitohq.com/how-to-write-better-code-using-mutation-testing/). Not only does this get the attention of potential candidates, it creates content that you can also use include in cold outreach (more on that later).\nA more time-intensive option is creating interactive content like coding challenges or puzzles, the Netflix algorithm contest being the most famous example. This can definitely work, Robby Walker, founder of Cue (acquired by Apple), wrote about how this worked well for them here (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/programming-challenges-benefit-job-seekers-and-employers//">https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/programming-challenges-benefit-job-seekers-and-employers/). It’s a high-risk strategy though. If you can’t design something genuinely interesting then spending time on this will be a boondoggle. If you’re confident in your ability to make something interesting then go for it but run your idea by some engineering friends first to see if it sparks interest.\nFinally your inbound conversion will increase the higher quality your job posting is. Invest time in making it stand out. Larger companies default to generic job postings that all look and sound the same (often because they’re literally using the same software to create them). As a startup you can do better. You could make your job posting personal by writing in the first person as founder about why you started this company. You could use an informal tone that doesn’t read like corporate boilerplate. Experiment with what feels right but move away from blandness.\n<h2>Cold Outreach</h2>\nCold outreach is messaging engineers online. This could be on career/recruiting specific platforms like LinkedIn or places where engineers spend time like Hacker News and GitHub. (One advantage a technical founding team has here is they’ll already know where the best places are to look).\nThe challenge with cold outreach, especially on recruiting-specific platforms like LinkedIn, is the overwhelming number of messages good engineers receive on them. For your message to stand out from the crowd you need to put in work to make it personalized. Greg Brockman has some great advice (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://stripe.com/blog/startup-advice-cold-recruiting/">https://stripe.com/blog/startup-advice-cold-recruiting) on this.\nYou’ll also see a greater return if you can hunt down email addresses rather than sending messages. If you’re looking at profiles on LinkedIn, use the Connectifer (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.connectifier.com//">https://www.connectifier.com/) Chrome extension to get them. Otherwise do what you can to find an email address (sometimes people include them in their forum profiles or try finding a personal website that might have contact information). If you have any press articles or noteworthy mentions, I’d link to these in the message too. You also need to follow up and expect it’ll take two or three emails before you get a reply.\nThis approach is how the majority of technical hiring at larger companies is done. Teams of recruiters reach out to candidates and optimize their messaging over time to get more responses. There are tools to help you with this optimization e.g. Sourceress and ZenSourcer. If you send enough messages this approach will work and can result in great hires. If you reach people just before they’ve started interviewing and move quickly, you’ll have a much higher chance of closing them.\nThe disadvantage is it’s very time consuming and will feel draining. The majority of your messages won’t get replied and you’ll be tempted to give up. You’ll have to commit to spending a certain amount of time per day sending emails and messages. One time saving trick you can consider is giving someone else access to your email and paying them to send the messages on your behalf then you handle the replies. How comfortable you feel doing that is of course your call.\nIt’s hard to estimate how quickly you might be able to hire through cold outreach. If you’re lucky you could get the right person in for an interview next week. More realistically, I’d expect this approach to take up to 6 months before it results in a hire.\n<h2>Recruiters</h2>\nHiring a technical recruiter to make your first engineering hire is hard to make work. The strategy they’ll probably use is cold outreach and it’s unlikely they’ll achieve higher response rates than messages coming from a founder.\nWhat a recruiter does have more of than you is time and focus. They can send more messages per day and this could get more candidates replying if the gap between their effectiveness and yours is narrow enough. My recommendation if you go down this route would be to find recruiters who work on a contract basis. You can agree on a rate per hour, how many hours they’ll work per week and for what period of time. Then if they’re producing candidates, great. If not, you cancel the contract. Anecdotally, I’m noticing a trend where more of the best recruiters at companies are starting to work as independent contractors for multiple startups.\nBefore working with a recruiter make sure you’ve invested time in really training them on how to pitch your company well. I’d give them all the information they need, give them a day to prepare and then ask them to pitch it back to you. Only work with them if they do this well.\n<h2>Meetups</h2>\nMeetups are difficult to rank on this list because their effectiveness has high variance depending on both the type of event and the type of person you are. Meetups that are primarily business conferences with corporate sponsors who send along some members of their IT department are almost certainly a complete waste of time. Smaller, informal meetups with a deeply technical agenda where people bring laptops and code can be great. Even these will still only be an effective strategy if you’re either:\n(1) An engineer who can gain the respect of other engineers through technical conversation. (2) A highly charismatic personality\nYou need to honestly decide if you’re either of these. If you’re unsure whether you are (2), you probably aren’t. If you’re (1) and tend to avoid group meetups, you’ll have to get over this if you’re the only technical founder. Convincing engineers to join is one sales job you can’t delegate entirely to your cofounder.\nEven if you attend great technical meetups and you’re the right type of personality, it’s still unlikely you’ll make a good hire quickly through this channel. The better meetups have fewer people and they’re primarily not there to find a job. It’s a good way to build a network of smart people, which will become valuable as you scale, but not a good bet to solve your problem right now.\n<h2>Agencies</h2>\nTraditional recruiting agencies tend to have bad adverse selection bias on the candidates they can engage. Most good engineers won’t work with them and the engineers that do are being sent out to as many companies as possible. I can’t think of a startup I know that made their first engineering hire through a recruiting agency. While I’m sure there are counter examples, it’s more likely using an agency will suck up a lot of your time with little ROI. The best agencies tend to focus more on executive level hiring which won’t be helpful for you.\n<h2>Conclusion</h2>\nAs I said at the start, hiring your first engineer is incredibly hard unless you’re lucky enough to have a friend you can convince to join. To make any other strategy work you need to treat hiring like you did fundraising and start by refining your message and pitch. Candidates think differently to investors and you’ll need to tweak the message that worked for your fundraise e.g. candidates will think less about your market size and more about your most interesting product challenges.\nOnce you understand what resonates most about your company with engineers you can switch gears to working through channels to get that message out to potential candidates. Then be prepared for a lot of struggle and rejection until you find the right person. Good luck!\nIf there are any other strategies you’ve tried with success that should be added here, please do email me (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"mailto:harj@triplebyte.com\">harj@triplebyte.com</a>), I’d love to hear them.\nIf you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://triplebyte.com/tblog/express/">use this link</a> to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire\n","comment_id":"1102767","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-08-21T05:02:11.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:05:59.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-08-21T05:02:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71094","name":"Harj Taggar","slug":"harj-taggar","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Harj.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at YC. He was previously founder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15) and Auctomatic (YC W07), which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/harj-taggar/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer/","excerpt":"Harj Taggar [https://twitter.com/Harjeet] is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte\n[https://triplebyte.com/] (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work\nat the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and\neffort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.\n\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThis post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first\nengineer. At this stage traditional","reading_time":12,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","uuid":"e6a0a134-b255-40e8-b7be-01494afbabe8","title":"Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring","slug":"learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave","html":"Welcome to the third edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog?query=learnings%20of%20a%20CEO\%22>here.
Pave helps companies plan, communicate, and benchmark employee compensation. Today, the company has 160 employees, more than 3,500 customers, and is valued at $1.6B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/matthewschulman?lang=en\%22>Matt Schulman</a> has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community. We sat down with Matt to hear his insight on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/pave-2/">building a team</a> in the early stages of his company and today as a CEO of a growth-stage company. Many of the first Pave employees were hired as a contractor before converting to a full-time employee. Would you recommend this strategy to founders? I strongly recommend the contract-to-hire setup in the early days of a startup, as it led me to have a 100% close rate with the candidates we wanted to convert to full-time. This strategy worked for two reasons: 1) By the end of the contract, the contractors had poured weeks of energy into the work – learning the code base and investing their time – and getting to know potential coworkers. This escalated their sense of commitment.2) I was flexible on working hours – open to them working nights or weekends. This made it easier for the candidates who were busy with full-time employment to say yes to working with Pave and earn extra income on the side. To convince people who were employed to work for Pave as a contractor on top of their current job, I framed the process as a mutual evaluation. This is an opportunity to evaluate the company and come to a mutual decision at the end of 2, 4, or 6 weeks together – no pressure. We paid them a fair market rate, and as mentioned, we were flexible on working hours. One contractor worked their day job until 5:00pm and then on Pave from 6:00pm-2:00am, for example. They were excited to be able to build something from the ground up and work closely with me at the earliest stage of the company – which is another strategy I used to encourage people to work with us. Before Pave, I was an engineer at Facebook and regularly worked on side projects. These projects were my fun, guilty pleasures because when I built something from the ground up, I felt an emotional attachment to the work. Usually engineers at large companies feel part of a machine, but when they build something full-stack from the ground up, there’s a magical allure to that work. I gave those contractors ownership over the work and often jammed out with them – working side by side at all hours. (One note: I did not have the contractors touch customer PII.) Within weeks, we’d both know whether Pave would be a good fit, and if so, we were already committed to each other.What were you looking for in early employees? When starting to build out the team, I was given a tip that the first 10 hires would set the tone for the next 100. Because of this, I personally recruited 100% of the early Pave employees. I sourced people, took phone screens, went to dinner, coffee, and on walks with candidates, and spoke with them for hours on Zoom and Facetime. It was an all-encompassing process. But I found that early advice to be accurate: The first 10 employees are the most important aspect in the company’s life cycle – other than finding product-market fit – and recruiting has to be the founder’s priority.When recruiting for the first ten employees, I wasn’t looking for experts in specific areas but generalists with rapid career growth, passion for our mission, and a hunger to work. Those early employees readily tackled whatever fire we were facing that day from engineering work and sales to back office and HR. I also had a deep level of trust with those first ten hires, as they were all in my network. Today, I still look for mission alignment and hunger but there are times I need to hire a specialist. I identify the tightest set of criteria for the role and only talk to people who fit that criteria. This is very different from the early days when I was solely looking for generalists who could fill multiple roles.How did you convince those early employees to join Pave? I always found ways to continue our conversation even when I could sense the candidate wanted to turn down the offer. I would do this by scheduling future conversations – saying that I needed to share something new with them – and then I would get to work writing a Google Doc that showed how I planned to invest in their career. We still use this strategy at Pave today, but it has evolved and is now affectionately called the collaborative Google Doc.The collaborative Google Doc is shared with the candidate and used throughout the entire interview process. The document outlines expectations for the role and frames the interview process in stages, communicating which stage the candidate is in at any given time to ensure we are working within their ideal timeline. We encourage the candidate to comment and add their thoughts to the document, including feedback for me and their thoughts on the interview process.As we get further into the interview process, I get more specific about what I’m looking for in a candidate. And when we get even deeper, I write multiple pages on what I’ve learned about their career aspirations through our conversations and backchanneling, and how I’m going to support them. When it comes to backchanneling for potential executive hires, I try to talk with at least 10 people and ask, “If I have the privilege to be this person's manager, I want to set them up for the utmost success. What are your specific recommendations about the best ways to set this person up for success and unleash their full potential?” This 360 review is shared with the candidate right before I deliver the compensation package. I outline what I learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and specific ways that I’ll push them and support them.When I communicate compensation, I lay out all the facts, including cash amount, equity (shares and dollar amount), and the benefits package. In addition, we also share:<ul><li>The salary band for the role (and implicitly their position in it).</li><li>The level that the employee will be in the organization, along with more information on our leveling framework and what each level means.</li><li>The methodology for determining the compensation, like the market data we use (75th percentile for similar stage companies).</li><li>Broader information on compensation philosophy, including how someone moves through the band, gets promoted, etc.</li><li>Additional info on equity: current preferred price, current post money valuation, details on vesting, PTE window, 409A price, and more – essentially everything they need to determine the actual value of the grant.</li></ul>We’re ultra transparent about compensation because compensation should not be a guessing game; people deserve to understand every aspect of their compensation package and how it was derived. I then offer to meet live to answer any questions or discuss feedback – or ask them to leave their comments in the Google Doc. Most candidates will ask questions in the document, as it can be more approachable.For every open role at Pave, a Slack channel is created to drive urgency and ensure no detail goes missed. Tell me about this process. As a seed-stage company, I was creating Slack channels for every role. Today, Slack channels are created for roles that I’m involved with – like hiring a head of finance or VP of engineering. The process still looks the same, however. I create a Slack channel for that role and add relevant stakeholders. Every morning I ask for an update. What’s the movement? Have we sourced any more candidates? Have we talked with candidates X, Y, and Z? I do this to keep the process moving forward every day. I also post updates – sharing with the team when I spoke with a reference, for example. When we extend an offer, I use this Slack channel to encourage stakeholders to reach out to the candidate through text messages or Loom videos. Loom videos are an interesting medium. If you’re a candidate and receive six Loom videos from different people at the company, it may feel bizarre and a bit overwhelming. But the videos show we are excited about the candidate and also gives insight into our energetic culture. You also review email copy and do drip campaigns for candidate outreach. Tell me about this. We have a pre-written email sequence that is sent from me or the hiring manager depending on the context, and then we use <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gem/">Gem to automate this. The response rates for these campaigns are much higher than if the emails were coming from a recruiter. Before the emails are sent out, I’ll spend 30 minutes personalizing 30 emails (one to two sentences at the onset of the email) that will be sent to target profiles. And then it’s important you do a drip. If you only send one email, most of the time the candidate won’t respond. I find sending a third email with a short message like, “Hey, any thoughts?” leads to the most responses. How do you think about where your job ends and your team begins when it comes to recruiting?Today, if I’m not the hiring manager, I delegate and come in only at the end of the process for a sell call. The process looks vastly different if I’m the hiring manager. I spend a lot of time reviewing resumes and identifying the top 25 profiles in the space. Every outreach to them is very personalized, and I have time to do this because I focus on quality over quantity of candidates. Quality over quantity was a big lesson for me, actually. At first, I would look at all inbound resumes and thousands of applicants. But I have come to realize that I have more success when I map out the market and find the top 25 candidates in the space. Then I'll find a way to get one of them in the door.Describe the ideal candidate for senior-level positions when Pave was a smaller company. As a company of 35 people, we didn’t need managers who delegated – which has merit at a later-stage company. We needed people who would personally take on the hard work. Often, first-time founders hire someone senior for optics reasons. Instead, you should look for someone earlier in their career who has grown at a crazy high slope – often referred to in the tech industry as a high-slope candidate versus a Y-intercept candidate. There is a time and place for both types of hires, but as a 35-person startup, almost always go for the slope, not the high Y-intercept. And in some cases, you may meet exceptional candidates with both high slope and high Y-intercept. This is the dream case!Another mistake first-time founders can make is rushing hires by trying to squeeze them in before a term sheet. Don’t try to meet some arbitrary deadline or cliff date. If it takes six months or a year to hire an executive, that’s ok – wait for the right person. This answer has been updated to clarify the founder’s intention behind the statement.","comment_id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--8-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-13T11:23:10.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T08:44:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-17T09:00:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"634d76fe3f2ab90001338eb9","name":"#21831","slug":"hash-21831","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave/","excerpt":"Welcome to the third edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions here.","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"62c640aadb59f2000159e618","uuid":"062e4f3f-c2e8-4f21-8a15-eb02adb47efe","title":"Same, Same but Different with Vanta and Zapier","slug":"same-same-but-different-with-vanta-and-zapier","html":"Both <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.vanta.com//">Vanta CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/christinacaci/">Christina Cacioppo</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://zapier.com//">Zapier CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/wadefoster/">Wade Foster</a> made the decision to take a disciplined approach to fundraising. They flipped the equation of a typical startup founder: instead of raising money to enable a certain amount of growth, they eliminated the assumption of fundraising, controlled their spend, and evaluated how to ramp up spending based on what the business was bringing in. YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with Christina and Wade to talk about their unique funding history in our first episode of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/new-yc-audio-series-same-same-but-different/">Same, Same but Different.</a> <div class=\"kg-card kg-audio-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/media/2022/07/SSBD_Final_1_thumb.jpg?v=1657216763245\" alt=\"audio-thumbnail\" class=\"kg-audio-thumbnail\"><div class=\"kg-audio-thumbnail placeholder kg-audio-hide\"><svg width=\"24\" height=\"24\" fill=\"none\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><path fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M7.5 15.33a.75.75 0 1 0 0 1.5.75.75 0 0 0 0-1.5Zm-2.25.75a2.25 2.25 0 1 1 4.5 0 2.25 2.25 0 0 1-4.5 0ZM15 13.83a.75.75 0 1 0 0 1.5.75.75 0 0 0 0-1.5Zm-2.25.75a2.25 2.25 0 1 1 4.5 0 2.25 2.25 0 0 1-4.5 0Z\"/><path fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M14.486 6.81A2.25 2.25 0 0 1 17.25 9v5.579a.75.75 0 0 1-1.5 0v-5.58a.75.75 0 0 0-.932-.727.755.755 0 0 1-.059.013l-4.465.744a.75.75 0 0 0-.544.72v6.33a.75.75 0 0 1-1.5 0v-6.33a2.25 2.25 0 0 1 1.763-2.194l4.473-.746Z\"/><path fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M3 1.5a.75.75 0 0 0-.75.75v19.5a.75.75 0 0 0 .75.75h18a.75.75 0 0 0 .75-.75V5.133a.75.75 0 0 0-.225-.535l-.002-.002-3-2.883A.75.75 0 0 0 18 1.5H3ZM1.409.659A2.25 2.25 0 0 1 3 0h15a2.25 2.25 0 0 1 1.568.637l.003.002 3 2.883a2.25 2.25 0 0 1 .679 1.61V21.75A2.25 2.25 0 0 1 21 24H3a2.25 2.25 0 0 1-2.25-2.25V2.25c0-.597.237-1.169.659-1.591Z\"/></svg></div><div class=\"kg-audio-player-container\"><audio src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/media/2022/07/SSBD_Final_1.mp3/" preload=\"metadata\"></audio><div class=\"kg-audio-title\">Same, Same but Different with Vanta and Zapier</div><div class=\"kg-audio-player\"><button class=\"kg-audio-play-icon\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><path d=\"M23.14 10.608 2.253.164A1.559 1.559 0 0 0 0 1.557v20.887a1.558 1.558 0 0 0 2.253 1.392L23.14 13.393a1.557 1.557 0 0 0 0-2.785Z\"/></svg></button><button class=\"kg-audio-pause-icon kg-audio-hide\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><rect x=\"3\" y=\"1\" width=\"7\" height=\"22\" rx=\"1.5\" ry=\"1.5\"/><rect x=\"14\" y=\"1\" width=\"7\" height=\"22\" rx=\"1.5\" ry=\"1.5\"/></svg></button>0:00<div class=\"kg-audio-time\">/59:28</div><input type=\"range\" class=\"kg-audio-seek-slider\" max=\"100\" value=\"0\"><button class=\"kg-audio-playback-rate\">1×</button><button class=\"kg-audio-unmute-icon\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><path d=\"M15.189 2.021a9.728 9.728 0 0 0-7.924 4.85.249.249 0 0 1-.221.133H5.25a3 3 0 0 0-3 3v2a3 3 0 0 0 3 3h1.794a.249.249 0 0 1 .221.133 9.73 9.73 0 0 0 7.924 4.85h.06a1 1 0 0 0 1-1V3.02a1 1 0 0 0-1.06-.998Z\"/></svg></button><button class=\"kg-audio-mute-icon kg-audio-hide\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><path d=\"M16.177 4.3a.248.248 0 0 0 .073-.176v-1.1a1 1 0 0 0-1.061-1 9.728 9.728 0 0 0-7.924 4.85.249.249 0 0 1-.221.133H5.25a3 3 0 0 0-3 3v2a3 3 0 0 0 3 3h.114a.251.251 0 0 0 .177-.073ZM23.707 1.706A1 1 0 0 0 22.293.292l-22 22a1 1 0 0 0 0 1.414l.009.009a1 1 0 0 0 1.405-.009l6.63-6.631A.251.251 0 0 1 8.515 17a.245.245 0 0 1 .177.075 10.081 10.081 0 0 0 6.5 2.92 1 1 0 0 0 1.061-1V9.266a.247.247 0 0 1 .073-.176Z\"/></svg></button><input type=\"range\" class=\"kg-audio-volume-slider\" max=\"100\" value=\"100\"></div></div></div>You can also listen on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://open.spotify.com/episode/3c1CmZtpzCqMa2MxXK845H?si=Ay6GBKIuT4OPfZePwUO4bQ\%22>Spotify, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/158-same-same-but-different-with-vanta-and-zapier/id1236907421?i=1000569160335\%22>Apple Podcasts</a>, or <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRkrNwoXKl/">Twitter. 3:20 - Christina, why did you wait so long before raising your first round? Vanta was bootstrapped until raising a Series A round that ended up looking more like a traditional Series C. The company has surpassed 3,000 customers and is valued at $1.6B. <ul><li>Investors want to fund businesses that don't actually need funding.</li><li>Christina talks about ensuring they were truly building something that people wanted and finding product-market fit. </li></ul>7:10 - Christina, what was the scale of Vanta when you decided to raise? Why did you decide to raise if you were cash-flow positive? <ul><li>Vanta had true signs of product-market fit, as shown by the impact of sales and marketing.</li><li>Christina talks about raising to ensure they didn’t lose the market they created. </li></ul>10:50 - Christina, how did you say no to the investors wanting to fund Vanta? What was your mental model? <ul><li>Be pragmatic with how you plan to spend funds; ensure the dilution from fundraising is worth it.</li><li>Christina talks about already hiring as quickly as possible and funds not helping with this challenge. </li></ul>14:15 - Wade, tell us about your experience raising a seed and why you decided not to raise again. Zapier raised only a $1.3M seed round in 2012 and has been profitable since 2014. The company is valued at $5B. <ul><li>Treat each funding round like it will be the last money you ever get.</li><li>Wade talks about his personal experience working for a quickly-growing, bootstrapped company, growing Zapier in a cost-effective way, and addressing constraints without fundraising. </li></ul>20:00 - Wade, did you always want to build a bootstrap company? When did you know Zapier had product-market fit and that it was a business model predisposed to being bootstrapped? <ul><li>When you make something people care about, it’s easy to sell to customers.</li><li>Don’t hire until it hurts.</li><li>Wade talks about finding product-market fit, their repeatable go-to market strategy to grow their base without a ton of capital, and their philosophy around hiring and building a remote company. </li></ul>24:30 - Wade, how did you attract talent without big headlines about fundraising news? <ul><li>Wade talks about hiring in a distributed way, writing about their learnings, and unique hiring tactics to raise the profile of Zapier as an employer. </li></ul>27:00 - Wade, what was the hardest part about hiring for a bootstrapped company? <ul><li>Wade talks about this not being an issue when hiring outside of Silicon Valley and already being profitable. </li></ul>29:15 - Christina, can you highlight Vanta’s journey to product-market fit? <ul><li>You can’t raise your way into the right product.</li><li>Christina shares insight into her first customers and advice on testing the value proposition with early users. </li></ul>35:45 - Christina, when did you know you had product-market fit and what were the signs? <ul><li>The path to product-market fit isn’t linear.</li><li>Christina speaks to the mistake of focusing solely on hiring versus selling in the early days. </li></ul>38:45 - Christina, how did you attract talent without big headlines about fundraising news? <ul><li>Christina shares how her pitch to candidates changed throughout Vanta’s journey. </li></ul>44:10 - Wade, how has hiring changed since the pandemic? <ul><li>Wade speaks to more companies competing in this remote environment and how this is shifting again given today’s economic climate. </li></ul>46:45 - Wade, what is your advice for founders whether to fundraise or not? <ul><li>Determine the constraints in your business and figure out how to address those.</li><li>Wade shares their biggest challenges and his mental model to determine whether to raise or not raise. </li></ul>49:00 - Wade, talk about your early days and how you were able to reach product-market fit as a remote company. <ul><li>When building a company, pick a lane: all remote or all in-office; the hybrid approach is the most challenging.</li><li>Wade talks about how this played out for Zapier, including working in-person with his co-founders the first few years and reaching product-market fit during this time. </li></ul>51:15 - Christina, do you recommend in-person, remote, or hybrid? <ul><li>Christina talks about the importance of documentation for remote and hybrid companies. </li></ul>53:30 - Christina, how long in Vanta’s experience was in-person important? <ul><li>Christina shares the challenges of shifting from in-person to remote. </li></ul>55:30 - Christina, how are you thinking about fundraising today in this funding environment and what advice do you have for founders? <ul><li>If you can, push your fundraising out — and if you can’t, it’s all about unit economics.</li><li>Christina talks about her recent experience fundraising (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.vanta.com/blog/vanta-announces-series-b/">$110M Series B</a>) and the importance of metrics. </li></ul>58:00 - Wade, what advice do you have for founders in this funding environment? <ul><li>Running a good business never goes out of style. Focus less on what investors care about and a lot more on what your customers care about.</li></ul>","comment_id":"62c640aadb59f2000159e618","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/07/Same_Same_1600x900_72DPI.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-07-06T19:10:50.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-07-07T10:59:27.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-07-07T08:55:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a7106f","name":"Y Combinator","slug":"yc","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/yc.png","cover_image":null,"bio":null,"website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/yc/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71176","name":"Podcast","slug":"podcast","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/podcast/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7115e","name":"Fundraising","slug":"fundraising","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/fundraising/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder 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Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a7106f","name":"Y Combinator","slug":"yc","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/yc.png","cover_image":null,"bio":null,"website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/yc/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71176","name":"Podcast","slug":"podcast","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/podcast/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/same-same-but-different-with-vanta-and-zapier/","excerpt":"Both Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo and Zapier CEO Wade Foster made the decision to take a disciplined approach to fundraising. They flipped the equation of a typical startup founder: instead of raising money to enable a certain amount of growth, they eliminated the assumption of fundraising, controlled their spend, and evaluated how to ramp up spending based on what the business was bringing in. ","reading_time":4,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/07/Same_Same_1600x900_72DPI-1.png","twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71af6","uuid":"686e1e7d-ad94-4ba6-9b90-31137e273ce7","title":"Hardware AMA with YC Partner Eric Migicovsky","slug":"hardware-ama-with-yc-partner-eric-migicovsky","html":"YC Partner <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/ericmigi/">Eric Migicovsky</a> recently did a Hardware AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here.\nEnjoy!\n<hr />\nSoftware is easy to release and sell as a beta, but we’re worried it will be hard to sell our hardware if it looks too “prototype-y.”\nHow can Hardware startups sell product as early as possible?\nAre preorders usually required, or is there a way to can sell product before setting up high-volume manufacturing?\nI could help more if you describe what you’re working on. But in general, you should try to be as hacky and prototype-y as possible. I wrote about this here: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
/n
For example: \n– Buy off the shelf hardware (eg RasPi + USB camera) and enclose it in a 3D printed case. Sell it. Many YC companies have done this in the past (eg Flock’s first gen device was exactly this – <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.flocksafety.com//">flocksafety.com, and Piccolo) \n– Buy a device that already does 90% of what you want it to do, then work with the manufacturer to customize the last 10% (I explained it a bit in that TC post)\nYou can sell preorders but I find it easier to simply build 2-3 units then actually sell them to early users. Then use the profits from that to build more units, sell them, repeat. That’s what we did for our first gen watch, inPulse. It worked great, we manufactured the first 1000 units one-by-one in the garage. Secondary benefit: you can immediately incorporate improvements into the product as you assemble them. Of the first 20 units we shipped – 4-5 were completely destroyed during shipping. We fixed that asap and never had the problem again.\nPlease tell your top must-read books for Hardware Startup entrepreneurs?\n<ul>\n<li>\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.amazon.com/Piloting-Palm-Handspring-Billion-dollar-Handheld/dp/075678798X/">Piloting Palm</a> is the best, most accurate book about starting a consumer electronics company. A bit dated, but still highly recommended.\n</li>\n<li>\n+1 for <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Hacker-Adventures-Making-Breaking/dp/159327758X/">The Hardware Hacker by Bunnie</a>.\n</li>\n<li>\nAlso <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122//">Pirates of Silicon Valley</a>!\n</li>\n</ul>\nWhat tools/resources did you use to develop and manufacture prototype?\nOur first prototype was just an Arduino (atmega) plus a screen from a Nokia 3310 smartphone. See the first proto here: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZDx86Ft0o\%22>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZDx86Ft0o For the next gen (called inPulse), we made the watch case out of CNC milled aluminium and designed a custom PCB. We actually manufactured this in our garage and sold several thousand units.\nWhat did you change in your product after YC W11?\nBiggest feedback we received from inPulse users was: longer battery life (was 24 hours), outdoor readable display, needs to work with iPhone, support for fitness tracking apps. We took the feedback and incorporated it into the first Pebble watch\nWould be great if you share your YC Application\nSure, here it is: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CemwTH8UpInp6wqyv822Usu_PQR_Ho8s/view?usp=sharing\%22>https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CemwTH8UpInp6wqyv822Usu_PQR_Ho8s/view?usp=sharing
\n
How much did you spend on the Kickstarter campaign?\nWe spent $5k on prototypes for the first campaign. Borrowed a camera and filmed the video ourselves. No other spend.\nWhen did you find the market fit, and how did YC and Kickstarter help you and your team with this?\nYC heavily encouraged me to talk to my users more. I had definitely been bad at this before YC. We also moved much quicker during YC. PG asked why we didn’t have an SDK for devs to write apps for inPulse. I gave all kinds of excuses but eventually he just asked ‘how long would it take to write one?’. We said 2 weeks, and he convinced us to just f’n do it. We did and it turned out to be a critical part of product development that lead us towards Pebble (which reached product market fit).\nTopic: How to be defensible?\nI applied for HAX accelerator and they rejected me saying: “Your product is good and innovative but not defensible. It can easily be copied”.\nMy product is a completely mechanical wheelchair. How to proceed in this case for being defensible. Anything other than patents that can help me here?\nAs without any electronics/codes/app I can’t go for achieving network effects. And being completely mechanical product, anyone can reverse engineer it.\nThere also comes the fear of getting copied by someone in the market (soon if the product starts selling good).\nOne thing I’ve learned about rejections: listen to the ‘no’ but not the ‘why’. Often times investor (including YC) have no idea whether a company is going to be successful or not, but it’s easier to reject than accept. We come up with vague reasons why we shouldn’t fund the company and then move on. From the entrepreneurs side, it’s hard to understand because usually the reasons sound logical but the crazy part is the VC probably will not fund you even if you fix the problems that they outlined.\nDefensibility is my view is the ability to build some sort of moat around your product that either: \na) disincentivizes customers from leaving for a competitor or \nb) reduces/eliminates competition. There are many ways to build this into hardware companies: \n– strong brand or great customer service \n– hw built on a software platform \n– access to a better supply chain, or cheaper/faster logistics \n– many more…\nIn your case, I bet the most defensible thing you could do is truly care about your customers base and move quickly to build products or features that your customers want. While this is not perfectly defensible, you’ll be surprised by how few companies actually do this 🙂\nAssuming that your MVP is a SaaS that receives feedback from a few devices: what are your thoughts on going to market with a hardware solution where your core piece is a commercial single-board computer (Raspberry Pi Zero W)?\nYou are on the perfect track. Do exactly that. I wish more people would follow your exact plan! There is a ton of money to be made by using off the shelf hardware, writing great software and solving a real business need.\nI build a scripting framework for bash which may have use cases for companies building systems on embedded Linux devices. Where can I find companies or strategic partners that are building hardware/IOT products on embedded Linux?\nI recommend reading about some past attempts in this space. Most recently the $9 computer people (Next Thing Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer) tried to do this and it didn’t work out. Probably because they were making customer chips though.\nHonestly most hw companies are very resistant to using off the shelf software in their custom builds. Might be an extreme case of NIH. I am always surprised by few companies there are that make sw libraries or modules specifically for embedded systems.\nYou can find potential customers on subreddits for embedded development, or on podcasts like EEVBlog or hackaday.\nWe’re a hardware startup building an interactive learning robot for kids. In the current funding environment, how much weight do you feel seed stage investors are assigning to a crowdfunding campaign?\nI personally assign a lot more value to a company that has shipped something to paying customers. Doesn’t matter how many units, 1 is a great start! Shipping a product means the founders have: \n– developed an idea into an actual solution to a problem \n– figured out some basic marketing and found potential customers \n– convinced those customers to part with their hard earned cash \n– built and manufactured at least one working unit \n– figured out the logistics of shipping and doing customer support \n– have a happy customer\nIt’s actually a lot cheaper (generally) to do this rather than execute a potentially expensive crowdfunding campaign. The best companies I’ve seen actually do the above, sell 50-100 units and then use the knowledge that they’ve gained from that process to create a fantastic crowdfunding campaign. They learn what potential customers actually want out of their product and how to correctly market it.\nAs you know, hardware startups are expensive. We are currently raising a SEED round and our ideal funding amount sometimes feels higher than we are comfortable asking for. When you are pitching your MVP product with a small number of users, how do you justify asking for the money required to take your hardware product from MVP to CVP? Especially when a software product can do it for so much less?\nIf you are already selling your product, why raise a seed round at all? Why not continue selling units to customers and grow your business organically off the profits from your sales? Raising money is super distracting from building product and talking to customers. I would recommend focusing on that.\nHardware startups in general are slightly more expensive that sw startups, but actually not that much more. It does depend on what you’re making of course. We started shipping the first hundred units of the inPulse watch on total spend of less than $50k CAD in 2010.\nWe are also working on prototype of fitness band(Patch). We already released android fitness activity tracker app for the same with few active users.\nI want to know how to reduce the expenses while building an MVP & how to reach potential customers.\nAnother question is what are the key points we have to consider while designing a hardware product?\nWhat expenses do you have right now? Presumably not many. Hard to know what to reduce without knowing what you’re currently spending 🙂\nKey points: same as with a software product. Are you building something that people want? This above all is the most important thing you should be working on. Finding product-market fit. Everything (literally) else is secondary to this all important goal. Often times HW founders think that cost optimization, or beautiful industrial design, etc etc is important…at an early stage – it’s not. The only thing that truly matters is ‘do people want to pay for your product and do they like using it’\nWe are developing a 3Door device using 3D face reconstruction and recognition technology. 3Door will have features like video doorbell, video interphone, security camera and smart access system. In a one-liner, you will be able to unlock the door of your property using your face. We developed algorithm and now we are working on a hardware development. We have a prototype but now we are looking how to make it more <code>consumer friendly/fancy</code>.\n1) Do you have some advice on how to find a vendor for electronics and printed board instead of using Raspberry Pi3 or you think that Pi3 will work well in our case?\n2) Also about the design of hardware, do you have a suggestion how to find the person that can help us with that task and anything else (advice/suggestions) related to this part will be very helpful for us.\nCool! I love smart door stuff. I’ve had a Lockitron on my door since Sept 2011 and haven’t carried a key since then 🙂\n<ol>\n<li>\nSounds like a Pi would be great for your use case. Just 3D print a nice case and make sure it can’t be easily stolen 🙂\n</li>\n<li>\nwhich part of the hardware design do you need help with? You could try posting on this forum, another startup may know someone who could help. For example there are many industrial designers who can do case design remotely\n</li>\n</ol>\nAre there any resources you could recommend for quality control and do you have any tips for sourcing and working with manufacturers?\nI have an electronics client and they have ~10% return rate. Last batch they had a 24% return rate supposedly due to a defective batch. How can you tell between defective hardware and bad design? For QC, they have a team in China that checks random x items to determine the defect rate, but is there a way to automate the QC testing process, or more sophisticated and better ways for QC? Or is the only way having someone on the team there at the factory?\nIs this an enterprise (b2b) or consumer product? Each group has different standards. If they are seeing 24% return rate, they have a big problem. One way to solve this is to institute 100% QC at the factory – meaning one of their team members, or someone they trust (not a factory working) is in-line at the factory checking each unit as it’s prepared. It’s a huge time sink and annoying but sometimes this is the only way to fix problems at the factory.\nDo we need to get validation that the problem we are trying to solve is ‘hair on fire’-type before building the MVP? We are building an IOT cushion to correct user posture and increase physical activity. People we to talk so far don’t believe it as there is no product to show.\nWhen looking for potential markets for a product I consider a venn diagram of 3 circles: \n– severity of problem (how much money can be earned or saved) \n– frequency of problem \n– spending power (does the person with the problem have the power to buy a solution)\nThe best hair on fire problems are people at the centre of all 3 circles. You can test your potential market by talking to customers and determining how willing they are to spend money to solve their problem. People with ‘hair on fire’ problems should be willing to prepay for a solution to their problem.\nOutsourcing Advice: Which part of that hardware startup, one can be better off by getting it done by a third party and not necessarily from a founding team?\nWhich one is preferred: Learning the activity self, and trying it first hand with the higher risk of failure at implementation or outsourcing it to a third party with the risk of beind dependent on outside at cost of some leverage?\nThings like Supply Chain, Web design, Industrial design, Aesthetics, Legal compliances etc.\nThis was a lesson I learned at the beginning of Pebble: it’s impossible to pay someone enough to care about your startup. You and your cofounders are the only ones who actually care. You are the ones who get up in the morning and throw 110% of your energy into making your vision come true.\nIn the early days, I thought I could get by with contractors doing things but they invariably failed, charged too much (and then failed) or did shitty work. The most helpful non-founders were friends of mine who I con(vinc)ed into doing odd projects, helping with the early assembly line and such. Looking back, I wish I had offered to make them cofounders and encouraged them to come on full-time.\nIn the early days, when money is super tight, founders have no choice but to do literally everything themselves. And that’s a good thing. Learning how to do something makes you better at outsourcing it later. Your naivety will also be an advantage – you may not know that something is ‘impossible’ and accidentally create a novel solution that an expert may have written off a long time ago. I benefited from a number of these situations.\nThe one area that I would recommend cultivating is a network of advisors and startup founders that are a few years ahead of you in the process. These people are the best sounding boards for questions like ‘who should I use for FCC testing’ or ‘should I use Shopify or build my own ecommerce site?’ (answer: USE SHOPIFY).\nI’d like to know the strategies you used to boost the success of your kickstarter campaign. If you had to do it all over again would you still go for crowdfunding (why/why not)? Thanks for your time.\nPeople tend to overlook the fact that I started Pebble in 2008, shipped several thousand units of inPulse in 2010-2011 and only launched Pebble on Kickstarter in 2012. That was 5 years later. We learned a ton in those early years, improved the product and figured out how to market it. That’s the real reason why our Kickstarter was so successful in 2012. There are no silver bullets.\nIf I were to do it all over again, I would definitely focus on shipping a working albeit alpha product to customers first, then only after shipping many units of that would I move onto a crowdfunding campaign.\nIn your experience, what is the minimum level of fidelity that a seed or an investor wants to see in a prototype/MVP? Any way to know it before pitching? Any recommendation? What was yours?\nBreaking the chicken and egg is really difficult, and wasting time on useless twitches is a very real problem for a hardware startup. But a fugly MVP seems to get you nowhere…\nAs a seed investor, I look first to see if the startup has shipped product to a paid customer. That’s the gold standard – if you can do that, you’re ahead of 99% of all other hw startups. So try to do that – don’t build a prototype just to impress investors.\nA fugly MVP with paying customers is no longer a prototype…it’s a real damn product with a market!\nI and my friend are both web developers. Recently, we’re so passionate about the idea of autonomous robot charging. We know that it involves high technology of AI and Robotic, but we believe in the vision and so start learning AI and Self-driving, which has a lot of similarity to our idea in tech aspect. We really want to bring in another cofounder who has decent knowledge in tech.\nHow do you bring in cofounders or hire technical people in these highly expertised engineering field?\nSince the learning curve is super steep, should we keep learning until we build a prototype to be more easily pitch in a new cofounder or go networking right the way, by just pitching the concept to try to bring in a new cofounder?\nSince you both are already technical, you could consider researching and studying the technology and work to build it yourself. I’d recommend this route as it’s entirely within your control – you don’t rely on any outside forces to make it happen. Alternatively you could consider bringing on another cofounder, especially if you happen to have a friend or past colleague in the space! But oftentimes I find that technical and problem solving ability beats experience in a particular domain.\nI’m a software engineer. I have 2 hardware product ideas but I don’t have the expertise on electronic/electrical field. What are the good ways I can find a like minded hardware expert as co-founder to research and bring out a product?\nSounds cool! What are the product ideas? Best way is to start by sharing your ideas with practically every person you meet. You never know who will be a) interested in the same stuff and b) have a complementary skill set that can help you make it a reality.\nThe key problem that I have right now is a manufacturing management. We got 6 months delay at the first batch and 4 months delay on the second production batch. Yes, we are still alive but I’m looking for a new manufacturer. I’m afraid that the problem is not in manufacturer but in my incompetence in managing them.\nQUESTION: Is there a proper way to deal (manage) with suppliers and manufacturers to get the product on time and with the expected quality?\nI know that we can set strict terms in a written contract/agreement, to cover the risks, but the manufacturer increases the price and increase the lead-time. Also, because the manufacturing cost is 2x-3x lower than the MSRP, I can’t assign the direct delay losses to the manufacturer as an equation MSRP * PO Quantity = Fines.\nWe had the same type of problems with Pebble – long lead time components really constrained us. If I were to do it again, I will try to design products specifically with easier to source components.\nHave you traveled to visit your supplier in person? Sometimes it takes in-person pressure to kick people into gear. Contracts will never have the right effect, they have to sense that you care and will stop at nothing to get it done. So it might be time to get on a plane and camp out at the factory until they get moving.\nDo you have any advice on pitfalls hardware startups should avoid as they mature? I’m not sure if it’s a subject you want to broach as Pebble had a large sales success but was sold to Fitbit. There are also a lot of consumer electronics companies that do IPO but struggle to maintain financial success afterwards (notable exceptions exist).\nI just would like an idea of what to expect on the road ahead of a hardware startup after prototyping, manufacturing, and sales no longer become issues to contend with. Much thanks!\nReally depends on the type of company. Consumer or enterprise? One-time sale or recurring subscription? The best advice for early stage companies is ‘how not to fail’ by Jessica Livingston <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail//">https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail/ and ‘how not to die’ by PG <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html/">http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
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Hardware startups usually die for the same proximate cause as non HW cos: they run out of money. It’s exacerbated for HW startups because they have inventory which locks of their cash early in the sales cycle. If I were to recommend one thing for hw startups – understand your cash conversion cycle and make sure you have the right ‘business model to company’ fit, which is just as important as PMF for hw companies.\nMy question is about the ethics of manufacture: Do you have any insights on how we could be more mindful of product impact on a long term basis?, the possible impact it could have on the planet, the ethics of the suppliers & manufacturing processes and long term repercussions, are there any tangible ways (you may have found) to measure or calculate the future impact of a product so it can be negated right at design stage? any resources would be very useful, as it is my goal to make my company among the most ethical on this planet.\nModern design thinking is centered around something called ‘cradle to grave’ product design. So you consider the materials going into your product and how the user will deal with the product after it’s lifespan is up. The easiest way to build this into your product is to design it to last and to be repairable. Then the user can continue to use it long into the future.\nWhat’s the best way to outsource embedded electronics prototyping? Also, what resources do you recommend when looking for a manufacturing partner in China?\nI wrote a post precisely about this: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
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It seems to be a catch-22 situation for a new company, as protecting product IP internationally, including design patents, brand IP etc, is cost-prohibitive at an early stage, yet without these in place, launching a product puts the founders in a non defensible position. How would you recommend tackling this challenge especially when your focus is creating a strong international ‘Brand image’?\nI would not worry about IP in the early stage except for a very specific set of products (mainly pharmaceuticals). If you really care about patents then file a super broad provisional patent for $500 to $1000. This gives you 1 year period to file a full patent for anything that you actually end up building.\n“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”\nMy company is working on remote control cars for car sharing companies. We’re remotely piloting cars so that there’s no need for an in car driver. Right now we are in the very early stages of development but we had a few questions.\n1. Our team eventually will need to recruit someone with a mechanical engineering background as my co-founder and I are a bit weak in that department, but we’ve been debating on if that person should be an early hire or a founder. Do you have any advice on how we should evaluate that distinction?\n2. Right now we’re bootstrapping development and we believe we have enough savings to get to an MVP though it might be cutting it close. Is there an ideal time to start the fundraising process?\n<ol>\n<li>\nEssentially the first 4-5 people at any company are cofounders. Sometimes they have the title, sometimes not. But they effectively are and should be treated as such with large amounts of equity. Think of it this way – if the first 4-5 people aren’t spending every waking second thinking about how to make the company a success, who else is going to? If you are relying on them to do this, they should be compensated as such. Some people need to make more money for personal reasons, that’s okay but the important thing is they still have a large % of equity. Don’t be stingy with equity to someone who is putting in 20% of the effort to make your company a raging success.\n</li>\n<li>\nNo, fundraising basically always sucks. I would try to optimize for earning revenue over trying to time fundraising. If you earn revenue you have cash to fund further growth and the happy side effect of making investors want to invest in you!\n</li>\n</ol>\n1. How essential is it to figure out the manufacturing aspect very early on versus just making an MVP prototype as soon as you can?\n2. Where can we go to read/learn about hardware startups and their product-market-fit process, and especially, how they scaled effectively? (including Pebble)\n<ol>\n<li>\nSpeed speed speed! The one thing a startup needs to accomplish is prove that they have product market fit. Everything else is secondary. So make the MVP asap!\n</li>\n<li>\nThis is a great blog by a friend of mine. Fellow HW founder: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://marcbarros.com//">http://marcbarros.com/
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What is your opinion in engaging product design companies if we can’t build the complete hardware all by ourselves? What are the documents needed to protect our IP?\nFirst I would try to build it all yourselves without working with product design companies. Not because of IP, but because they’ll bleed you dry with fees and are generally slow. Now I don’t know what you’re trying to build (feel free to share!) but in general, I’d recommend pursuing a path more like this: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware//">https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/
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Harj Taggar is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.

This post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer. At this stage traditional recruiting methods e.g. hiring a recruiter won’t work as well for you as they do for larger companies.

Hiring your first engineer at a startup is incredibly hard. As a founder you’re already stretched dangerously thin on time. There are bugs to fix, customers to close and any number of urgent existential fires that demand your full attention. You know you should be spending more time on hiring but it’s a battle to find it.

The bad news is even once you find the time, much of it will feel like wasted effort. Hiring isn’t the kind of work that provides you constant dopamine hits. It involves a lot of dead ends and frustration.

Start by being clear on what exactly you’re looking for. I’d recommend listing all the specific criteria your dream hire would have. This will be a combination of technical (are they a good engineer?) and non technical (would I work productively with them?). Then mark each candidate you interview against all these criteria and rigorously debate if you think they have enough strengths in some areas to make up for weaknesses in others.

In practice hiring decisions invariably involve tradeoffs. You could trade quality for speed by rejecting solid candidates to wait for the dream one. Or you could trade money for time by paying a candidate above market rate to join now. Founders should be aware of all these tradeoffs and make the one that’s best for your circumstances.

Once you know what you’re looking for, you’re ready to start finding candidates. I’ll go through the strategies available, starting with what I believe is most effective and working through to the least.

Note: As the founder of a hiring platform I’m not neutral in discussing their effectiveness. I have articulated both their advantages and disadvantages and we did make our own first engineering hire through Triplebyte.

Personal Networks

This is the most important source by far. Once your startup scales it’ll become less important as you’ll have more budget to spend on recruiting tools and building a recruiting team. At the start though it’s where you should exclusively focus your energy and only consider other sources when you’ve exhausted all possibilities here.

Hiring someone you’ve already worked with is your best option because you already know if you’ll like working with them. How much you enjoy working with any single person matters less as you grow larger but for your first hire it could be the difference between persevering to success and shutting down the company. (Caveat: startups are also uniquely stressful environments and there’s still some probability you might not enjoy working with your friend under this kind of stress as much as when you were both at a bigger company).

You’ll also have a better chance to convince someone you know to take a risk and join you. Asking anyone to join as your first hire is asking for an order of magnitude greater commitment than pitching an investor to invest. With personal connections you’ll know what would most motivate them to join and you can lean on friends to help convince them to make the leap.

Yet I’m surprised by how often founders don’t fully explore their personal networks for hiring. It’s easy to be quick in assuming that none of your friends are available before even asking them. It’s understandable. Asking your friends to leave their jobs and take a risk with you is scary. It’s also more awkward to be rejected by your friends than strangers. Still, if you’re optimizing for the success of your startup you’ll have to put this aside. Here’s a plan you could follow:

Make a list of the best engineers you know, whether you think they’re available or not. Go through your Facebook and LinkedIn to jog your memory.

Invite them to lunch or dinner with them to talk about your startup.

Make the ask – would you consider joining us?.

Whatever they answer, ask a follow up question – if you did join us, which engineers would you most want to hire?.

Ask for an introduction to those people.

Repeat 2 – 5 with each of the introductions.

Repeat 1 – 6 ad infinitum, I know public company founders who still do this. Expect to be spending at least a third of your time on this alone.

For your first three engineering hires I’d recommend focusing exclusively on personal network hiring. As your team grows though you’ll start thinking more about the composition and diversity of your team. Hiring through your personal network usually isn’t the best option for this and the larger a team grows the harder it becomes to change the balance. After your first three hires, I’d suggest continue to work your personal network and supplementing with the strategies below to meet candidates your own network wouldn’t reach.

Hiring Marketplaces

Newer recruiting startups like us (Triplebyte) and Hired operate as marketplaces. There’s candidates on one side and companies on the other. The value to candidates is increasing their number of options and to companies it’s reducing their time to make hires.

These marketplaces are strictly inferior to using personal networks for your first hire. The good ones can attract high quality candidates but most will want to work somewhere that already has an engineering team. They also charge a fee per hire that will usually be around $25,000 for an experienced engineer. Whether that’s good value for you depends on how much funding you’ve raised and how much founder time you’d have to spend on making that hire.

Candidates on these marketplaces are also speaking with multiple companies so you’ll face competition. You can get success though (we’ve had startups make their first hire on Triplebyte). Your results will depend heavily on how effective your pitch and closing process is. I’ve seen a lot of variance in how effective companies are at this. An engineer hired at Gusto (YC W12) through Triplebyte blogged about how much difference there is between companies in just being responsive to him. To get the most from a hiring marketplace you need a polished pitch for why your company is an exciting place to work and a speedy process for moving them from first call to interview and offer.

Despite the disadvantages I still rank (good) hiring marketplaces as your second best option because they provide quick access to a pool of vetted, skilled engineers. The candidates on these marketplaces are mostly motivated to move jobs right now. You can quickly get on the phone to make your pitch and start interviewing the interested ones. This also helps you practice and improve both your pitch and calibration on what exactly you’re looking for. Getting better at pitching will increase your success at hiring in general.

Some of the marketplaces will also do a rigorous technical evaluation of the candidates before accepting them onto the marketplace. If that evaluation is done well, you can skip your own pre-onsite technical screening and expect a higher conversion rate of onsite interviews to offer which saves you time. (The average direct to onsite to offer rate for Triplebyte candidates is 40% vs the industry standard of 20%).

Generate Inbound

As an early stage startup you likely won’t get much organic inbound interest from good engineers. The quickest way to generate this is posting on job sites. However most job sites aren’t frequented by high-quality engineers. They’ll get you volume, not quality and volume alone isn’t what you want. The majority of job applicants for any job posting are below the bar and it creates more work for you to filter them. The job postings I would recommend trying are on sites with a sizable engineering audience e.g. Stack Overflow Jobs, the monthly Hacker News “Who is hiring?” thread (Hacker News job postings themselves are only available to YC companies) and Angel List.

You can also create content that appeals to engineers to generate inbound interest. This is especially easy if you’re working on a particularly exciting idea e.g. self-driving cars. As soon as you publicly announce what you’re doing you’ll get a burst of inbound applications. As this type of startup you’ll always have a hiring advantage by having an easier time getting press and building brand recognition.

Developer tool companies also have an advantage. Your product is already interesting to engineers and you should be investing in writing good quality blog posts about it – both to attract customers and for hiring. Set a goal of writing an article that’s Hacker News front page worthy at least once a month.

If you’re not either of these types of companies you can still blog about the technical choices you’ve made. Have you made any controversial or unusual choices in your stack? If so, write about them. You may alienate some engineers who disagree but you may also capture the full attention of a few who agree strongly e.g. Cognito have especially strong views on testing and wrote about how they use mutation testing (https://blog.cognitohq.com/how-to-write-better-code-using-mutation-testing/). Not only does this get the attention of potential candidates, it creates content that you can also use include in cold outreach (more on that later).

A more time-intensive option is creating interactive content like coding challenges or puzzles, the Netflix algorithm contest being the most famous example. This can definitely work, Robby Walker, founder of Cue (acquired by Apple), wrote about how this worked well for them here (https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/programming-challenges-benefit-job-seekers-and-employers/). It’s a high-risk strategy though. If you can’t design something genuinely interesting then spending time on this will be a boondoggle. If you’re confident in your ability to make something interesting then go for it but run your idea by some engineering friends first to see if it sparks interest.

Finally your inbound conversion will increase the higher quality your job posting is. Invest time in making it stand out. Larger companies default to generic job postings that all look and sound the same (often because they’re literally using the same software to create them). As a startup you can do better. You could make your job posting personal by writing in the first person as founder about why you started this company. You could use an informal tone that doesn’t read like corporate boilerplate. Experiment with what feels right but move away from blandness.

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach is messaging engineers online. This could be on career/recruiting specific platforms like LinkedIn or places where engineers spend time like Hacker News and GitHub. (One advantage a technical founding team has here is they’ll already know where the best places are to look).

The challenge with cold outreach, especially on recruiting-specific platforms like LinkedIn, is the overwhelming number of messages good engineers receive on them. For your message to stand out from the crowd you need to put in work to make it personalized. Greg Brockman has some great advice (https://stripe.com/blog/startup-advice-cold-recruiting) on this.

You’ll also see a greater return if you can hunt down email addresses rather than sending messages. If you’re looking at profiles on LinkedIn, use the Connectifer (https://www.connectifier.com/) Chrome extension to get them. Otherwise do what you can to find an email address (sometimes people include them in their forum profiles or try finding a personal website that might have contact information). If you have any press articles or noteworthy mentions, I’d link to these in the message too. You also need to follow up and expect it’ll take two or three emails before you get a reply.

This approach is how the majority of technical hiring at larger companies is done. Teams of recruiters reach out to candidates and optimize their messaging over time to get more responses. There are tools to help you with this optimization e.g. Sourceress and ZenSourcer. If you send enough messages this approach will work and can result in great hires. If you reach people just before they’ve started interviewing and move quickly, you’ll have a much higher chance of closing them.

The disadvantage is it’s very time consuming and will feel draining. The majority of your messages won’t get replied and you’ll be tempted to give up. You’ll have to commit to spending a certain amount of time per day sending emails and messages. One time saving trick you can consider is giving someone else access to your email and paying them to send the messages on your behalf then you handle the replies. How comfortable you feel doing that is of course your call.

It’s hard to estimate how quickly you might be able to hire through cold outreach. If you’re lucky you could get the right person in for an interview next week. More realistically, I’d expect this approach to take up to 6 months before it results in a hire.

Recruiters

Hiring a technical recruiter to make your first engineering hire is hard to make work. The strategy they’ll probably use is cold outreach and it’s unlikely they’ll achieve higher response rates than messages coming from a founder.

What a recruiter does have more of than you is time and focus. They can send more messages per day and this could get more candidates replying if the gap between their effectiveness and yours is narrow enough. My recommendation if you go down this route would be to find recruiters who work on a contract basis. You can agree on a rate per hour, how many hours they’ll work per week and for what period of time. Then if they’re producing candidates, great. If not, you cancel the contract. Anecdotally, I’m noticing a trend where more of the best recruiters at companies are starting to work as independent contractors for multiple startups.

Before working with a recruiter make sure you’ve invested time in really training them on how to pitch your company well. I’d give them all the information they need, give them a day to prepare and then ask them to pitch it back to you. Only work with them if they do this well.

Meetups

Meetups are difficult to rank on this list because their effectiveness has high variance depending on both the type of event and the type of person you are. Meetups that are primarily business conferences with corporate sponsors who send along some members of their IT department are almost certainly a complete waste of time. Smaller, informal meetups with a deeply technical agenda where people bring laptops and code can be great. Even these will still only be an effective strategy if you’re either:

(1) An engineer who can gain the respect of other engineers through technical conversation. (2) A highly charismatic personality

You need to honestly decide if you’re either of these. If you’re unsure whether you are (2), you probably aren’t. If you’re (1) and tend to avoid group meetups, you’ll have to get over this if you’re the only technical founder. Convincing engineers to join is one sales job you can’t delegate entirely to your cofounder.

Even if you attend great technical meetups and you’re the right type of personality, it’s still unlikely you’ll make a good hire quickly through this channel. The better meetups have fewer people and they’re primarily not there to find a job. It’s a good way to build a network of smart people, which will become valuable as you scale, but not a good bet to solve your problem right now.

Agencies

Traditional recruiting agencies tend to have bad adverse selection bias on the candidates they can engage. Most good engineers won’t work with them and the engineers that do are being sent out to as many companies as possible. I can’t think of a startup I know that made their first engineering hire through a recruiting agency. While I’m sure there are counter examples, it’s more likely using an agency will suck up a lot of your time with little ROI. The best agencies tend to focus more on executive level hiring which won’t be helpful for you.

Conclusion

As I said at the start, hiring your first engineer is incredibly hard unless you’re lucky enough to have a friend you can convince to join. To make any other strategy work you need to treat hiring like you did fundraising and start by refining your message and pitch. Candidates think differently to investors and you’ll need to tweak the message that worked for your fundraise e.g. candidates will think less about your market size and more about your most interesting product challenges.

Once you understand what resonates most about your company with engineers you can switch gears to working through channels to get that message out to potential candidates. Then be prepared for a lot of struggle and rejection until you find the right person. Good luck!

If there are any other strategies you’ve tried with success that should be added here, please do email me (harj@triplebyte.com), I’d love to hear them.

If you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, use this link to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire

Personal Networks

Hiring Marketplaces

Generate Inbound

Cold Outreach

Recruiters

Meetups

Agencies

Conclusion

Author

Harj Taggar