They say that your first 10 hires are the most important ones to get right.
If you bring in 10 people and they recruit 10 of their friends, then you have 100. So your first 10 is really your first 100.
That can be intimidating because when the company is growing you need to hire to fill roles fast. Work is piling up quicker than you can hire, and your mindset is purely "grab a shovel and dig".
We just became a company of 10, and I can say that it's definitely true. In a high growth stage, getting the first 10 hires right is everything. Great people compound the company, and you cannot lower the bar to fill a role.
I could go on, but there's plenty of good stuff written by more experienced people out there. My goal with this is to just share a few of our own stories.
I'm sharing these stories because early-stage hiring is unstructured by default. You are both trying to figure out the candidate and the process at the same time. But hopefully these stories can be helpful in showing just how far you should look to find truly excellent people. It's not just agencies and job boards.
I'm sure there are even crazier stories out there, but these are some of ours:
Fully committed
Sometime in Sep 2022, an engineer came inbound and asked to contract with us. He was working at a startup focused on sustainability as well, and he heard about us at a conference earlier that summer in NYC. We did a few intro calls, and it was pretty good but I honestly don't remember being that excited. Helena was really excited about him though, and we agreed to have him take on a project that I had been investigating to integrate with a new blockchain.
Then came the the FTX fallout in Nov 2022 that sent us into a weird time. We continued to meet pretty regularly, and one thing that stood out to me was his insane commitment & grit. I guess that's the silver lining of bad developer experiences and poor documentation.
We ultimately decided to shut down the project and pivot entirely. He was bummed about it, but still motivated. He told us to reach out to him once we had a direction. I could feel the belief he had in us that we would figure it out. Once you have a direction, not if.
A few months later, we caught up again and I shared that we still weren't sure but we were narrowing it down. He was eager to jump in, and shared that he was going to be in the US again visiting his girlfriend at the time in NYC. When I told him that we were going to a hackathon this weekend to try and prototype one of the ideas, he rebooked his flights with his girlfriend and added a weekend stop in SF.
We ended up doing the hackathon together and built a full working prototype that weekend for what ended up becoming Streamline. It was epic. Even a year after that weekend, people ask me why our repo is called scale-ai-hackathon.
We were impressed by his dedication and how well the 3 of us worked together, and right after the hackathon ended we took him out to dinner and gave him a physical offer letter that he signed on the spot.
When I think about all the people that believed in us and took a bet on us, this story comes to mind. And it brings a smile to my face every time.
Total time it took (from getting to know each other to joining time): 5 months
Easiest decision ever
In Q2 2023 sales started to ramp up and we kicked off our search for another engineer. I remember one day in this hiring sprint, Helena perked up and asked "Do we need a designer?" She was skimming BookFace and another company had shared the profiles of a few designers that they liked but couldn't hire because they had just filled the role.
At the time, I was our unofficial designer and just starting to learn basic things like auto-layout in Figma. I was hesitant about taking this call. It didn't feel like we had enough design work to justify someone full-time, but I took the call anyway because his background seemed interesting.
And interesting it was. He had a very non-conventional background, and I asked him so many questions in our first call that we ran over by 30 minutes on a 30 minute call. After that call, I booked a follow-up call with him to discuss what working together might look like.
The second I logged onto the next call I noticed his background was different. So I asked him about it. He said he was visiting his girlfriend in SF, and at that my jaw dropped. "When were you going to tell us you were going to be in town? You need to come visit the office!"
He came in the office that afternoon. I was ready. I had an entire onsite schedule planned out after having a conversation with another founder in the kitchen area of our coworking space. One of her investors was the 1st designer at Facebook, and she helped them nail down their designer onsite structure. I thought it was great, so I whipped something up myself that was very similar.
But when he came to the office, it was like an old friend was visiting town. He sat down to show me some of his projects, and we just spent hours talking about it. The entire onsite schedule I had planned went out the window.
He showed me 10 different projects that he made, and I was super impressed by how interdisciplinary his skillset was – UX, 3D modeling, interior design, architecture, etc. But I was even more impressed by his depth. Each project was built with a different design tool (Framer, Figma, Webflow, Spline, etc.), and he knew each one like the back of his hand.
I remember thinking "we have to figure out a way to work with this guy!"
He must have felt the same way because he didn't want to leave. He invited a friend he was supposed to meet up with to come to our office, and stayed until 9pm. After he left, Helena and I decided to give him an offer before he left SF.
In startups, there are generally 2 perspectives when it comes to hiring:
- Hire only for what you need & make clearly defined roles
- If someone is good enough, you make a role for them
In many cases, I think it's more nuanced than this and the context of how quickly the business is growing matters as well. But in this case, we leaned heavily in #2.
And looking back, it was a great decision. After we brought him on, we kicked off a design partner program that shaped our entire roadmap for 2024. We booked back-to-back interviews, and worked tirelessly to incorporate every round of feedback into the next iteration of prototypes we showed. Every call we learned a ton, and I estimate that the clarity we got from this accelerated our product by 6 months.
As much as I'd like to think that I would a Figma god by now, this sprint would not have been possible without a world class designer. The dots only connect looking backward sometimes.
Total time it took (from getting to know each other to joining time): 2.5 weeks
The long game
While we doubled down on design partners, we continued to look for a second engineer.
At the time, we worked in a coworking space with over 20 other startups and we were all hiring (and struggling). One day at lunch it clicked – why don't we host a startup job fair?
We ended up hosting a job fair with 800+ attendees, and every company had a custom banner and booth. It was a lot of work to put this on, but we figured it would be worth it if we can meet even 1 really good engineer from this.
Towards the end of the day, someone came up to our booth and made it very clear that he only cared about 2 companies at this job fair. We were one of them.
But he wasn't looking for a job. He had just started a job less than a month ago and moved to SF. He was just looking for friends, he told us.
Around the same time, Helena and I had started to host weekly bike rides to recruit housemates for a climate coliving house in SF. We invited him to these rides. I remember the first week he showed riding a Lyft bike with us through the hills of SF because he didn't have anything else. That was pretty hardcore.
After a few weeks, we really got to know each other and I remember thinking "wow if only the timing had been different." I was sure that he would want to hit his 1 year vesting period before considering anything else at all. But Helena had different plans. She would continue to text him and nudging him until one day we got this text.
He had started his company before, so he asked a lot of intelligent questions about market risk, GTM, etc. He was asking questions as if he were an investor, so we set him up to chat with one of our angels. Not long after that, he decided to join and we made it official.
The most memorable part was the 2 weeks before he started. He had to transfer his TN visa over, and during this time he would come to our office on the weekends to start hacking on stuff. One day, he joined our standup at 9am. When I asked him "isn't this when you guys have meetings?" he turned his laptop around to show us the all hands that he was skipping to join our call.
This one stood out to me because in the beginning I thought it might take a full year before he would even consider it. But I was prepared to do that because I knew he'd be amazing on the team. This experience taught me what "playing the long game" really looks like in recruiting.
Total time it took (from getting to know each other to joining time): 8 weeks
Closing thoughts
Hiring takes a long time, and you should be prepared for that. How I prepare for that is always being on the look out. Even the barista at the cafe could be great if you eventually have a coffee bar on campus.
Being able to recruit a kickass team is one of the most important skills that defines a world class founder. I love our team, and I have loved building it.
I hope that these stories help you build yours.