Hiring the Initial Team
Every startup story starts with the founders! Sometimes a solo flight but often a shared dream of a couple of friends, ex-colleagues, or ex-teammates. Uno’s story is no different. Muru and I worked together very closely back at Elementum, a startup that was redefining the old world of supply chain using graph search. We were there together during the 0–1 journey of that company. Early journeys are exciting! Full of hard work, intense collaboration, healthy conflict, and accelerated learning. There is also plenty of drama and anxiety to add to the mix. Odds are against you as you build something from nothing but your dreams, aspirations, excitement, and ambitions make you confident, bold, and surefooted.
Muru and I built a great sense of camaraderie and mutual respect at a professional level that evolved into trust and friendship over the years. We have consulted and brainstormed with each other on numerous professional and personal matters. Our skills and personalities are complementary and we have a great working rhythm!
Ideation and brainstorming around a problem we know very closely, led to the conceptualization of Uno organically! In a short period of time, we had the initial product strategy, patents, early feedback from potential customers, and initial investors in place. It was time to start building Team Uno!
For context sake!
Building high performing teams is one of our strengths! Startup after startup we have been early and have built really awesome teams. It’s been exciting and fun for us to convince successful people to forgo comfort for adventure and find diamonds in the rough; engineers, designers, and folks with a spidey sense of business early in their career. We have been able to jolt people out of their comfort zone in large successful FAANG companies and convince them to make a life-changing move. It’s been rewarding, exciting, and very fulfilling to find such people and see them grow and prosper. We are grateful that these very talented people gave us the opportunity to grow with them, and learn from them. We were lucky enough to sometimes work with some of them over multiple companies. You know who you are. If you are reading this. Thank you!
Despite our background, experience, and history, we fully realized that hiring was not going to be easy in this market. The pandemic, the roaring markets, and extreme war for talent had driven compensation and overall expectations to levels that most early stage startups find it extremely difficult to match!
Hiring for the 0–1 journey
We are in what is coined by Peter Thiel as the 0–1 stage. At this stage you need team members who are extremely talented, learn fast, have the ability to switch roles and adapt, have low ego, and are passionate about winning and making a dent in the universe.
You need missionaries, not mercenaries, on your 0–1 journey!
Missionaries are driven, ready to fight against odds. In some ways challenges get the best out of them. They get creative, adventurous, and energized.
When assessing our potential hires and making hiring decisions, attitude and evidence of future promise should outweigh current skills. Don’t spend energy trying to figure out what they don’t know. Dig deeper into their strengths and motivations. Understand their skills and how they acquired them and how they continue to improve and evolve. Spend time on reference checks. Try and understand what drives this person, how they have performed on tasks and projects, what motivates them, how they take responsibility, and respond to challenges. Ask for stories, not opinions.
We assess attitude, personality, and leadership skills, in addition to conducting thorough technical sessions. Will write about our problem solving focused technical and programming interviewing technique in a separate post. It’s fun! Candidates have enjoyed it often and it gives us great signal and has proven to be very effective. Also, we do not assess culture fit. Remember, we are all about diversity so assessing to make sure the next person is like the rest of us goes against our grain.
Location matters
In the pandemic era, remote working became the new normal. While, we are big believers of flexibility, empowerment, and remote work, we are also firm believers that loss of velocity and momentum at early stage can be disastrous
This means, for us, being on the same proximate time zone is more important than nation state boundaries or geographical proximity. In other words, someone in Seattle, Vancouver, or Los Angeles, is as good as having someone in Berkeley. (We are based out of Palo Alto, CA!). All things equal we prefer to have a remote team mate in Vancouver over New York. Time Zones in Europe have little overlap for us on the west coast and Asian time zones are flipped on their head and create energy impedance mismatch; one is all fresh and energized while the other is tired after a long day. New Zealand is doable. They are in a time zone close enough if you disregard the fact that they are a day ahead.
It’s important that team members have the possibility of collaboration with team mates for most parts of the day. Being in the same or close enough time zone allows for multiple opportunities to converse, interact, and sync everyday.
Speed, focus, and close synergy among team members is absolutely necessary in an early stage startup as it’s a race against time and there is very little organized documentation or specification in the beginning.
Culture starts with the initial team
Being thoughtful and deliberate in who one hires in the early stages is absolutely important. The culture of a company does not come from written statements but from what is practiced and incentivized on a daily basis. How the founders and the early team members behave is what ends up as defining the culture of the organization.
The cost of bad hires, especially in the beginning, is very high. When you are a 5 person company and you have 1 wrong hire, your company is 20% net negative. The impact of that is very high.
Don’t fear making mistakes. If you make errors in judgment and hire wrong candidates, it’s better to let them go soon.
Hiring A players
Silicon valley legends and demigods have often propagated the idea of hiring A players. They perform well and attract other A players. B players on the other hand attract C players.
There is no standard or objective measure to assess and classify candidates as A, B, or C players. Sure, some are clearly not capable and get weeded out early and some others have phenomenal backgrounds and great history to act as supporting evidence but they may not turn out to be A players.
I have never met an entrepreneur (not even the worst and incapable kind) ever believe anything other than that they and everyone they have handpicked is an A player.
So how is one to know that they have hired super stars and how to find out quickly that a wrong hire somehow made it through? The key lies in 4 important parameters:
- Do not tolerate unethical and unreliable behavior. It’s indicative of worse things to come.
- Focus on attitude towards learning and adaptation. Look for early signs and if there are plenty of red flags that a new hire is unwilling to try then it’s better to call it out and let them pursue something else.
- Understand what drives them. High levels of self-motivation: where there is a will there’s a way. If someone has a desire to learn, grow, and succeed,they will.
- Willingness to collaborate. Startups are a team sport. Stories of brilliant jerks and bro cultures leading to disaster is part of modern silicon valley folklore. Do not tolerate it, even in small amounts.
Back to the network
There is a lot of conversation around the network effect and its benefits for products, companies, marketplaces, and the adoption of newer behavior patterns. Less is spoken about a network and its effect on building winning teams!
One’s network plays a key role in building a team as well. People you have worked with in the past, gone to school with, hung out with in your neighborhood, and learned from or helped, become your network. It’s very common for startup founders to raise their initial rounds and hire people from within their network. You know the people, their strengths, and have a level of trust established.
Muru’s network and mine are both deep and wide. We have been on multiple startup journeys, many of which have become very successful. We have been lucky enough to attend some excellent schools and been living and working in the heart of Silicon Valley for many years. Our paths have crossed with many smart, capable, and motivated people. That is surely an advantage. We are not the only startup with such an advantage. Founders coming out of the vibrant silicon valley ecosystem tend to have this sort of unfair jump start.
The concept of silicon valley is more this network than a location. Although, unlike more recent mainstream narrative, I would argue location does have a major part to play. Perhaps, in another blog post, another day.
Some of our excellent angel investors and advisors are people we have known and worked with. We are actively in conversation with some excellent people in our network and looking forward to bringing them onboard. Not everyone will necessarily become part of this new adventure but we know many will join.
Timing and the long view
Unlike in big corporations, hiring for a startup is not simply filling positions. Don’t create exact job descriptions and try to shoehorn every possible candidate into one of those.
The best people are often not seeking new opportunities and have multiple choices to boot. Your relationships, network, or the exciting pitch could get the conversation started but they will only become part of the team if they feel they can grow, learn, and make a difference. Their aspirations and ambitions need to align with the vision and mission of your startup.
The only way to attract such talent is to have a long view. You may not even have an appropriate role for some of them today but opportunities will emerge and these people will become part of your winning team as you grow.
We are doing the same. I have, over the last multiple months, and continue to spend a few hours every week, reconnecting and chatting with people in my network. I also continue to get to know newer people who are a couple of degrees apart. It’s been exciting to reconnect or meet people, I didn’t know before. These are outstanding engineers, product people, founders of successful companies, marketing wizards, sales geniuses, designers, great thinkers, researchers, investors, and company builders. Not everyone will eventually join our journey but some will. I am positive they will make a big difference. Even those who don’t join us will help us learn something new.
Search for future leaders
The long view has time as one dimension but scope as the other. When we started looking at potential candidates, we started asking ourselves, what kind of a head of engineering would help us prosper, who would become a great sales leader for us, and would customer success have a part to play in our product led growth story? Which leaders would drive effective execution and also deliberately help build an inclusive and happy workplace. Pursuit of excellence, tenacity, and diversity of opinion and background is very important. It avoids groupthink and collapse of promising ideas.
We drew out a list of future leadership roles we would like to recruit for, even before we had hired the very first team member. We knew it would make sense to bring some of these people onboard only after 6 months, a year, or even two but deliberately planning for it and initiating the conversation was important.
The search is on and we are seeing excellent ongoing success on this count.
Recruiters come in later
Recruiters are great and I have had great success working with many of them.
However, as founders, you need to hire your initial team yourself. Not with the help of recruiters and certainly not through agencies. There are 3 reasons why hiring yourself in the earliest of phases is important:
- Mission, not a job. Every hire needs to feel connected to the mission and the north star of the company. On day 0, founders have the best understanding of their mission.
- We are all humans. Personal connections we make during the process and stories are often anchors for making decisions to hire someone at the earliest of stages. It’s also the reason why people join.
- Recruiting is a great place for feedback and learning. As a founder, you sell, all the time. You excite your investors, enthuse your team members, energize your customers, and invigorate the community in which you build and thrive. Each meeting with a prospective hire, is an opportunity for you to make a pitch. Pitch about the exciting future, promise of building something special, and allure of making an impact. You get an opportunity at selling more often when you are actively hiring. It’s your golden moment to get feedback, explicitly and implicitly, and get better at the game. Don’t let it go.
LinkedIn: the failed promise
As soon as we had updated our LinkedIn profiles late last year, i.e. winter of 2021, to say that we had started an autonomous security company, we started getting messages from potential candidates and recruiters. That was very encouraging and exciting. Given this experience when we started hiring we immediately thought of a job posting on LinkedIn.
We posted an opening for a “Data Scientist”. Within 72 hours of posting this job, we had 75+ candidates who had applied for this job. We were thrilled and eager to assess and bring the best of these onboard!
We looked at every candidate who had applied and selected a first set of candidates for an initial conversation. Our thesis was that a quick conversation would help us learn a bit more about the candidate and we could then decide if we wanted to move ahead with an initial thorough technical assessment and the rest of the steps.
The first thing we noticed on LinkedIn was candidate apathy. We learned that perhaps the biggest culprit is the “easy apply” button. LinkedIn wants engagement from its users so it pops up all possible matches and allows candidates to apply with a single click. One click shopping makes sense because it allows users to quickly buy something. When it comes to easy apply there is absolutely no cost or penalty if a candidate later decides to withdraw or is rejected because the candidate was not even a remote match in terms of job expectations.
In addition, LinkedIn is infested with outsourcing software development shops that are focused exclusively on labor cost arbitrage. We received a number of in-mails and emails from multiple vendors after our job posting on LinkedIn promising to give us 3 excellent programmers for the price of 1! They even promised to build us a mobile app at a rapid pace when we didn’t even need to build one?
Despite these annoyances, we did have an opportunity to talk to a few good candidates via LinkedIn. We are thankful for it and it was great to meet these fantastic people. However, none of these candidates made it through our selection process.
AngelList worked for us
Our intent was to hire a mix of candidates and make sure we got a couple of fresh and young graduates onboard. We decided to hire experienced candidates through our network and use a modern online platform to attract graduate students. Hiring candidates fresh out of school has done wonders for us in the past. We have hired from a diverse set of schools, including Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, USC, CMU, RPI, Georgia Tech, SJSU, and UCSC, among others. Many of these young hires became the driving force in a few of my previous teams. They transformed from new hires to tech leads and outstanding performers within months. They were motivated fast learners who generally increased the energy in the company.
We wanted to repeat our success at Uno so we added college hiring into the mix. Graduate school and PhD candidates only for starters. We were advised to use Handshake. We set up a profile and requested schools to list our jobs on their respective handshake sites. Our experience with Handshake was very disappointing. In almost all major schools, Handshake required detailed information on the company and product, a fully built website, and more. Does a fledgling 3 month old startup have all of those? The answer is a clear no. Handshake wasn’t an option for us.
We then turned to AngelList. AngelList is probably one of the best platforms to post startup jobs.Our expectation was to attract a few young graduates. In the process that lasted over a month, we received applications from a number of outstanding candidates. We had not only fresh graduates from top schools but outstanding experienced people, ex-founders, and even researchers and faculty at some big schools apply for a job at Uno.
We had mentioned we wanted someone in the US or Canada and candidates on AngelList respected that. We did not receive any spam via that platform asking us to hire 3 for 1! Since we had mentioned Canada as well, we did receive a number of very qualified and excellent candidates from there too.
We originally posted two jobs: 1. Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist and 2. Cloud Engineer. We got a number of great candidates for both but clearly machine learning and data science was the favorite. We were now able to shortlist and get to a lot of fantastic candidates. Candidates who fared really well in the technical rounds, had excellent experience, and fantastic references. Scheduling and communication via the Angel List platform is also very easy and powerful. Overall, we got a lot more qualified and excellent candidates than we could hire.
Closing the hiring process and bringing aboard new team members
Once we identified our candidate,we were excited to make an offer, it was time to close and get them started. We were extremely fortunate to have a very high acceptance rate. Barring a candidate or two, everyone we made an offer to accepted our offer over other awesome opportunities they had.
The reason to join was consistent. Every smart engineer wants to work on something meaningful and exciting, away from mundane programming or bureaucracy, even if it pays substantially more in the immediate term. The extremely smart and motivated kind are the ones that make great 0–1 team members. It was a win-win for both parties.
Our hiring continues
Team building is an ongoing process! We are super excited about our current team. We are thrilled to have great people onboard and a few more are getting ready in the dugout to roll! Thanks for choosing Uno.
Hiring, enabling, empowering, and hiring more as you grow is the path to company building. Diversity remains key. The current experience has reinforced that we are not going to compromise on quality. We want the very best. We are here to win the championship!
To quote Michael Jordan:
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships!”
