Hiring your early team

Takeaways:

1. Engineers continued to be the predominant function across the first three hires. Not shown in the chart, but 100% of companies hired at least one engineer among their first three hires .


2. Interestingly, customer success/support continues to be a popular role for the first three hires. Of the non-engineer hires, almost a quarter of them are

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Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an advantage:

“All of our early hires were friends/ex-coworkers.”

“First hires were practically all former colleagues. Several people who worked with me in m

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Takeaways:

1. Sales becomes the second most common hire , after engineering.


2. A quarter of companies hired a product manager at this point.


3. Recruiters become a surprisingly common hire. I did not expect that. This is particularly true across some of the most unique startups, like Linear, Figma, Ramp, and Coda. Here’s Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear,

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Segment and Amplitude hired a customer success/support person as employee #1. Here’s Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment) on why they did this:

“ There’s something really magical when you write in to a startup and they fix your issue within a few hours. It’s something you’d never, ever expect from a big company, and it was one way for us to di

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How to convince people to join your startup

I actually researched and covered this in a previous issue, so go read that post. Here’s the high-level summary of what you need to get right:

1. Captivating vision —Make it easy for candidates to visualize what you are building toward and to feel like their work will be meaningful.


2. A++ early team —The best

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Cold outreach

I was surprised to learn that the second most common channel for finding early employees is cold outreach—finding people you want to hire and reaching out to them directly. These outreaches happened mostly through LinkedIn and GitHub, and unlike channel #1, this is something anyone can do.

“We filled many roles through cold hard outbou

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