Lenny's Newsletter - Hiring your early team
👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. Welcome to part six of our ongoing series on how to kickstart and scale a B2B business. Here’s where we’re at:
A huge thank-you to Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks), Andrew Ofstad (co-founder of Airtable), Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex), Boris Jabes (CEO of Census), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO of Canva), Christina Cacioppo (CEO of Vanta), David Hsu (CEO of Retool), Eilon Reshef (CPO of Gong), Eric Glyman (CEO of Ramp), Guy Podjarny (CEO of Snyk), Jori Lallo (co-founder of Linear), Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel (co-founders of Stytch), Keenan Rice (founding team), Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front), Rick Song (CEO of Persona), Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng (co-founders of Zip), Ryan Glasgow (CEO of Sprig), Shahed Khan (co-founder of Loom), Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Coda), Sho Kuwamoto (VP of Product of Figma), Spenser Skates (co-founder and CEO of Amplitude), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), and Tomer London (co-founder and CPO of Gusto) for contributing to this series. Art by Natalie Harney. For this step, I’ll focus on the four most common hiring questions I get from early-stage founders:
1. Who to hireI asked all the founders I interviewed who their first 10 hires were: Let’s break this down by your first hire, first three hires, and first 10. Who to hire as employee #1Takeaway: Developers, developers, developers, developers. Over two-thirds of the companies hired an engineer as employee #1. Not a big surprise. In the rare case when an engineer wasn’t the first hire, it usually came down to the founding team having enough horsepower to build the V1.
Founders were instead able to de-risk, or un-bottleneck, something else. Vanta hired a compliance subject-matter expert as their first employee:
Coda hired a recruiter:
Sprig hired an AI data scientist, and 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:
The first three hiresTakeaways:
And here’s Rick Song, founder and CEO of Persona, on hiring a PM as employee #1:
The first 10 hiresTakeaways:
2. Where to find your early employeesOnce you have a sense of which roles to hire, how (and where) do you find amazing people? I asked each founder how they found their early employees. Their answers all fell into four channels: Channel 1: Friends and former colleaguesUnsurprisingly, 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:
But not so fast. There’s also a downside to this path, as shared by Segment and Linear:
Channel 2: Cold outreachI 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.
Channel 3: Job boardsAlso, surprisingly, a lot of early hires were found by posting roles on public job boards—again, something every founder can do. By far the most mentioned job board was AngelList. Also mentioned were Triplebyte, Facebook groups, and VCs’ internal job boards. Shoutout: If you’re looking for the best jobs in town, check out Lenny’s Job Board! 😅 Channel 4: Friends and former colleagues of your employeesA final channel, which, if you recall, was also useful for finding your early customers, was tapping the networks of your early employees.
I didn’t get many interesting quotes for this channel, but it was a fruitful one for many founders, and worth spending time on. 3. How to convince people to join your startupI 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:
4. When to hire a salesperson, and what to look forAlways start with founder-led salesEvery founder I spoke to started with founder-led sales—doing the sales themselves until they reached a certain milestone. David Hsu (founder and CEO of Retool) shared why he found this so valuable:... Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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