My first time of my every first time at the first time at Tech Crunch was a ton of apologizes on match making. Prior to this, I was like a pass by visitor without an intention at Winter Party and CES 2019. This time I even join a Zoom round table with TC Managing Director Eric to talk about woes in startup hiring. Eric broke the ice by sharing his early stage when hiring the first part-time co-founder and CTOs. At the end of the event, we just realize there is a writer of NYT following the same topic.
I personally realized my whole note for the second day topic was just about hiring people. It has been a few years for me to search for a co-founder. To be honest, the result was not positive. Hiring people for the early stage and finding co-founder are also one of the most frequent question I hear from my own accelerator — Pioneer.app In my past ten years moving around so many several startup across the world as a problem solver and helper, I would say this is indeed a tricky problem.
Lots of people chose to be solo like me (at least we don't have to worry much about coding. Just a matter of debugging ~___~)
Low expectation, high energy
There are people who can learn in the process and people who heavily rely on memory to get things done.
(I would borrow two terms coined by DeepMind co-founders: Learner vs Expert. Also that was all we have discovered so far in intelligence research, at least that was how Alpha Zero defeat Human Expert. Link here)
Different from well-established organization, a type of people who are fitted to startups are quite interesting. Forget about your past experience, you are here (in startups) to optimize learning and personal growth. It means you will handle tasks that not in your responsibility, put more extra work to get a little bit more done every day. Every day is day zero. It is not about where you start and whatever advanced degree you have. It is more about the amount of learning that you are accumulate during a chaotic process. I would say chaos because it is indeed no process at all until you look backwards. And brutally be honest, you are both underpaid and overworked in two years.
The math of startups only really works only when a company hit an IPO or a big acquisition. Not sure about over-funded/ hyped company but seems that most of them don't really end up very well. I would say it would be hard to lots of people to make this math.
Pre-series A
There is another reason why startups fail - breakup between founders and hiring a wrong person. One bad egg could ruin an entire of a basket.
For startups, especially those following model of Silicon Valley, people talk more about the future in the time horizon of five, ten years, and even more. The right fit for pre series A startups is a group of people who really have a firm and positive belief in the mission and vision of the company. And also has a power to dream and imagine the world as the better place. Easy to say but it is really hard to do, especially with uncertainty when a harsh reality drives a rolling coaster process.
Fancy nouns do not work here, only execution works. So founders, choose carefully.
Another perspective here is to our-source talent search in a cheaper market. I have seen this many times. Some startups in my home country exploit this technique to extend their runway. Some works with freelance, dev shops and part-time engineers. However, the main question was more about commitment. Before finding out a new market, you will need to do several fast iterations and experiments. Along the way there will be a lot of things changed along the way both in good and bad directions. Most of the time, you don’t know when it would happen.
Perception
Similar to how conventional media from the East Coast with several well-established financial institution describe companies based in the Valley. And also how hyped Tech Crunch was to general audience. That perception was not true, especially when both social media and traditional media tend to exaggerate news for click baits. The reality is 99% startups fails and you don't even know them. Only 1% success as outliers but you probably don't know them in the first 2-5 years.
I always feel a bless in disguise for lean startups. It is not only about how scrappiness yields creativity — which is how Slack, Notion, Airbnb and several successful startups were founded. It is also about betting on people and see a beauty of a transformation in the process.
Take away to find startup people:
Avoid BIG nouns and FANCY numbers, search for evidences.
Be a learner and find other learner. If you are technical, learn to do business. And vice versa.
Have the right expectation.
My second time at the round table was a little bit different. There was much more color and diversity (Yay!) One person spoke up then the next person also spoke up — a chain of nuclear reaction.