Working for a startup can be transformative for your life.
In any country but especially in countries like India for example
We're working on a full video about this, literally on how a startup job
can provide transformatively income to someone
But today I want to talk about getting a job at a set startup
Our team is coming up at 40 people, which is a bit mind-blowing every time that I think about it
And we still have some openings by the way if you want to check them out
There are two clear paths to working for a tech
company. The first one is quite simple: be a developer.
Engineers are so scarce these days- you are essentially guaranteed a job if you are a good
developer. You’ll be treated to flexible hours, good salaries and all the perks.
That's one path
But how about the rest of the jobs at a company?
What if you're not an engineer?
So, today I want to talk about how startup founders approach
recruiting in tech, what skills and qualifications we looking for,
and if you are a recent graduate, or you come from a different industry.
How you can bridge your way into a startup job
Let’s start with early-stage companies
New companies are… well, new. A lot of questions have not been answered
and those questions extend to tasks.
Ideally, a company should be iterating really fast,
and that is what we look for in those early hires.
The decision to hire someone at that stage comes from two reasons:
1- The founders need to delegate tasks.
2- They are looking for a skill set they don’t have.
In the first case, delegating tasks- essentially what we
have always done is make a list of tasks that can be delegated.
We try and group them into a group of skills
that a single individual can have, or that they can easily learn because they are close to each other.
That’s what we go and create an opening.
We group task and this look like a role that we can call something like this
In that case we are looking for people that can wear many hats, rather than specializing in a
single team. We look for people who won’t complain if they end up doing something they weren’t hired
to do, on the contrary, we want people who enjoy the challenge to learn a completely new skill.
The way we’ve always formed roles for new hires has been by grouping tasks that seemed compatible.
For example, one of our first hires was Gaby, who became Head of Customer
Success for a couple of years. She used to manage support requests from customers,
automated onboarding, and maximize conversions.
There’s no career path in college for being a Customer Success Manager. It touches
marketing, it touches sales- but you don’t study for it- so college degrees were mostly irrelevant.
What we mostly cared about was their experience doing something
similar for other startups. The fact that she had used Intercom
(the tool we used at the time) was an absolutely killer qualification.
We also met her during our time at Startup Chile, where she was working for another
company (that was already out of business, we didn’t poke her out).
But beyond anything,
we cared about her proactiveness, her ability to propose new ideas, and her ability to learn fast.
Now on the other hand, companies also hire skillsets they don’t have.
For example, none of us had sales experience when we started Slidebean,
and one of our first go-to-market strategies was going after mid-sized businesses.
which requires a sale
In that case, we look for people who are obviously more experienced than us in that field
And of course, it’s hard to hire someone for a role that you don’t really know how to do.
What questions do you ask?
and how do you know they give you the right answer
This is where recommendations go a long way.
In our case, this hire was our first Head of Sales, Derek- who was ending a tenure at Xero.
We felt that Xero was a similar-enough company to Slidebean: SaaS, originally founded outside the US
but now tackling that market, similar subscription size, targeting small and medium businesses.
One curious note to my point, we didn't end up working well with sales
We didn't do enough selling well to medium size businesses
So Derek's role has to transform into something else
Once again, he had or these employees need the willingness
to move their task to work on something completely different from what they were hired.
Now there’s a common theme in both of those examples, which is experience.
If you have never worked on a startup, getting the first foot into this world is harder than ever.
Going for early-stage companies is a good bet.
The barrier of entry is absolutely lower for them, though that comes with its own risks:
your job might become irrelevant if the company pivots- or the company might run out of money.
Now, another way in which you can get that experience is doing it for ‘free’.
Cash is a concern when running a company, and that’s just the truth.
If a company really needs a hire, they are often willing to come up with alternatives.
And one of them is a combination of salary or even zero salary with sweat equity
where you are compensated with a fraction of company equity rather than
a salary. Not a big fan of this since equity may be cheap at first, but it can be expensive later.
So you don't really want to use this as a founder.
But this concept of trade: work for experience- is not entirely crazy.
Other initiatives like the HUMAN Protocol have also been trying to solve this for years now.
They created this concept to allow people to essentially exchange
work. The first concept included helping companies choose between A/B and solving
CAPTCHAs. Essentially you solve a Captcha and get tokens for it.
But their plan much bigger, they want to use their token to let people collaborate
on larger projects, and get compensated for it as their work is validated by the community.
Showing that you are curious. That you are willing to play around with new technologies,
to collaborate with online teams, to keep yourself busy and learning,
and exploring. That’s the kind of people that do well with startups.
Let’s talk about later-stage companies. I can’t speak for anything later
than ourselves which again are coming up with 40 people, but here's what I know so far
Now that the team and the company are bigger, we know very well what roles are. Again, with 40
people, we are either replacing someone who might have left or hiring someone to help them out.
Those jobs at larger startups are less risky.
We still don’t require startup experience for all tasks, but that willingness to explore
and experiment with technologies is always something we look for.
A common question we ask is ‘What is something really cool that you
achieved at your last job?’ - which is a fantastic way to learn about
their creativity, the way they delegate tasks, and the stuff that gets them excited.
and just create creativity or what they meant to achieve
We also ask them about their favorite startup. We
get a lot of people who answer ‘Apple’ or ‘Google’ which of course are not startups.
A good way to tell us that they are not in the vibe.
We want people who discover cool little niche tools that they love. Who hopefully try to reach out to the founders Again,
that shows that they are willing to download and play around with something and fell in love with that app
We also now have the luxury of expecting them to have
heard about Slidebean somehow, but that’s just very new.
College degrees are still mostly irrelevant in our case. We care a lot more about the experience:
not just work experience but life experience. The fact that they
move abroad, backpacking the world, running a side-hustle!
We love that stuff!
Now for the management side, now we can almost always afford someone with startup experience.
We of course look to promote our own team rather than hiring someone new
the only management hires, again, are for skills we haven’t already developed ourselves.
Or we were looking for someone higher or more experienced
Hopefully, this gives you a good insight into what startups look for in their team members.
at least at our stage.
I want to thank Human Protocol for sponsoring this video! Applications built on HUMAN
technology are already used by millions of people to label data and prevent bot abuse.
You can create an account and begin collaborating (and of course
earning tokens) at humanprotocol.org or by clicking the link in the video description.
Thank you for watching, we'll see you next week.