How to hire great talent for your startup

Sheldon Bishop
April 16, 2024

Good morning! This is The Zero to One. Equipping you with the best tools, resources, and actionable tactics to take your startup to the moon.

Here’s what’s in store for you today:

ICYMI ⏮️

Last week I deep-dived Morning Brew, the newsletter making business news fun and digestible.

In the last 10 years, Morning Brew went from a PDF attached to a BCC email chain to 4M+ subscribers and over $70M in revenue.

Click below to see how two college students launched and sold a newsletter empire for $75M.

One of the most difficult things to get right when starting a company is hiring. Especially when you are a startup:

There are three key steps to hire great talent:

How do you actually go about finding awesome people? And how do you convince them to even talk to you?

There are three main ways that John identifies:

The Friend Method: You ask your smartest friends for introductions to their smartest friends. This way, everyone you meet is vouched for by someone you trust. Ask people you know what type of person you are looking for. 👯
Online communities: Think about where the people you are trying to hire spend their time online. For example, if you are hiring engineers, look on engineering subreddits. 🖥️
LinkedIn: Make a list of all your competitors that are more established and reach out to their employees. You get ignored a lot, but you can find awesome talent this way. 🎙️

But once you’ve found awesome talent, the tricky part comes in. How do you vet if someone is truly the perfect fit for you?

It’s important to be super thoughtful, making sure you are hiring the best fit for the job and not just hiring for convenience.

But how do you figure out if someone truly is the perfect fit for you?

There are two key principles you need to keep in mind when someone is going through your interview process:

Your Values: What are the qualities you care about in a candidate → Your hiring rubric.
Your Needs: What do you need someone in this job to be responsible for → Job description and responsibilities.

But before you can hire someone, you need to sell them on yourself.

In the beginning, this is very hard. You’re this small company and there’s no guarantee that you make it.

You have to convince someone to join your vision and take a bet on you.

It’s important here to understand what early hires care about and how you can appeal to this. Some of these things include:

Belief in you as a founder. Work on your pitch, including “why you”, to a point where you inspire people who hear it.
Financial stability. Is your company financially secure? Or is there a clear path to getting there?
Mission alignment. Do you have a genuine alignment between the purpose and mission of the company, yourself, and your potential hire?

Be super intentional about who you hire. It will be the most important thing you do when growing your business.

Darrel Frater is looking to make $500k investments into pre-seed or seed companies (link)
Nate O’Brien is looking to invest $50k - $100k checks in Q2 (link)
Y Combinator (YC) S24 is taking place from Jul-Sept 2024 in San Francisco, the world’s preeminent startup accelerator, YC, is now accepting applications to their Summer 2024 batch. Some of their past investments include Stripe, Twitch, Airbnb, Reddit, and Zapier. The deadline to apply is 22 Apr (link)
Founders Inc: Investing the first check (up to $150k) into founders building emerging tech. The program is aimed at helping you transition from builder to founder (link)