snippets #12 - 12.24
On hiring
Welcome new folks! The last issue took off unexpectedly and many of you are new subscribers. Wondering what you’re getting yourself into? I write stories about startups from my experience. You can take a look back at some of my previous posts here.
This week’s newsletter is on hiring like a startup.
About a third of a founder’s job is building a company people love working for. This means hiring, firing, stoking culture, managing, and leading the team. For many founders, this is the first time you’ll be in charge of these roles. And yet, it’s one of the most important things you can do for the success of your business. It’s also one of the things that sets great startups, and eventually companies, apart from bigger corporates. Companies that attract great people and keep great people will inherently build faster, build better products, sell more, and scale faster.
So what’s the secret to hiring like a startup? First it starts with culture. If you create a place with a strong identity, people will flock there. People want to work somewhere that appeals to them. Period. Build a place where people want to be. (PS - there’s not one way to do this. There are all kinds of people, so build a place that’s aspirational. Where would you want to work? Try building that.)
Startups are a unique beast. We have cyclical hiring coinciding with funding rounds in the early years, followed by scale hiring as you start really ramping up revenue (or continued financing if no revenue). Here’s what this often looks like.
You almost always end up falling behind schedule because the plan you present to investors has you filling roles immediately or quickly after raising, which is hard to do. “Here’s a plan based on raising $Xm to hire Y people.” Instead, it should be closer to “here’s where we’re going, we have Y people in our pipeline to bring on now and know that we’ll likely be growing into Z roles in the next 12-18 months. To do that, we’re raising $Xm.” It’s a slight difference, but it is important. One has you playing catchup. One has you proactively steering the ship.
OK, so our challenge is hiring great people, who fit with the culture of the company, on an aggressive timeline (remember for startups, we think in 12-18 month increments). Here are some of my tips.
Continuously build pipeline - anyone in sales knows you will not hit your number if you don’t have a solid pipeline of prospects. Similarly, if you need to hire good people, you need an amazing pipeline of candidates. One of the ways I keep my pipeline full is holding office hours throughout the year. Most recently, I held office hours for anyone who was thinking about a career change into agtech. I held over 100 sessions with people, from data scientists to engineers to designers to marketing professionals. We weren’t looking to fill a position at the time, but now we are. And now I have an immediate pipeline of people who might be great candidates. If you’re doing these types of things throughout the year, you’ll be actively building your pipeline for future openings.
Rely on process - earlier I mentioned how important culture is. If you are going to build a company with a strong culture, people are the key executors of that culture and therefore are the most important piece of the puzzle. When you go from 3 people on a team to 10, you are going to dramatically change the culture of the company and if you don’t have a process for hiring, your culture will play second fiddle to the quantity of people you’re hiring. For my company, our core values steer our culture. So, we hire with them too. All candidates go though a core values interview first with Artemis. We are evaluating mutual fit for the company and the candidate. Is the candidate curious? Will they push back on ideas? Do they value transparency? Are they respectful? Do they value ethics in decision making? Not everyone will enjoy working at Artemis; we’re looking for the folks who will not just enjoy it, but add to our culture.
Hire the absolute best - if you are continuously hiring, you’re going to come across people who are the best in their field and who may not be looking to join a new company at the time. Or you may not be hiring for a specific role at the time. If that person is the best at what they do and a great cultural fit (see #2), you should hire them. If you can’t hire them now, make sure you keep them engaged and try to hire them later. They may be over budget. Hire them. This is one of the secret sauce ingredients for startups. We have the flexibility to do this. At one point, I started a conversation with a phenomenal engineer on Twitter. He had previously founded a company you would definitely know and saw a nice exit from it. He is big in the developer community and has an outstanding network. He isn’t just a leader though, he’s a stellar engineer. We met for coffee. I soft pitched him (anyone who knows me knows I don’t really do soft, so we’ll call it more medium pitch). He wasn’t really looking at the time, but was open, so we kept meeting. I asked what he needed from a compensation perspective and we offered it on the spot. He has now been on for close to two years and has been such a strong addition to the team. Corporates can’t do that. They have open positions, they fill them based on however their recruiting team works. Good talent is in the DNA of startups and as a founder you should make sure you’re constantly moving fast to hire the best people.
Retain good, lose the bad - you will make mistakes. You will hire the wrong person for a job. You will hire someone too early and they’ll be bored. You’ll hire an asshole from time to time. You’ll hire someone who seemed like they were the best at their job and were only good at pitching themselves. You will make mistakes. That’s part of the job. It’s also your job to consistently cull your crop. If someone isn’t the right person for the job (and assuming you trained properly, set them up for success, and are working with them on improvements first), you have to let them go. Chances are, they’re miserable too. You want to make sure amazing people are happy and have the tools they need to succeed. Everything else is likely a distraction. Early in our company’s history, I believed we were ready to hire our first salesperson. This, by the way, is something lots of startup founders fail at. I thought we needed a director level candidate. I hired someone I thought was the best. They had a great pedigree, great sales chops, understood the market and the product. But they were the wrong level. I was the person selling our product at that time. I went out and found leads, called through lists, gave demos, and the works. At the director level, this employee was used to someone doing those jobs for him. He wasn’t prepared to go back into the full cycle of sales. So he failed. And we parted ways. And I went back to the drawing board. This has to happen continuously (especially in the early days).
That’s it. The TLDR is: cultivate what makes you special as a company, talk to people all the time about that specialness, find people who are great at what they do and add to the specialness, and keep them happy. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?
If there are two things you take as action items from this post (for companies of any size), here are my recommendations:
Try holding some sort of office hours with your LinkedIn network to help build pipeline.
Try adding in an interview framework related to company culture. You’ll be surprised at how much value this adds immediately.
What I’m reading
I just finished Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime. If you’re interested in how big companies think about M&A, I highly recommend it. Iger led some of the largest transactions in history, including LucasArts, Marvel, and Pixar. It’s a quick read and has some great stories.
What’s Next?
I’ve had a few requests for how to evaluate startup success at the pre-revenue and post-revenue (pre-scaling) stages. That’ll be in the next issue.
Happy Holidays everyone!