Hiring

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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The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people.

This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows

you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last

longer. Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks

explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don'... See more

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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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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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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