we’re hiring, but…
It’s not a walk in the cake 🍰 …how to land a job @ a startup
tl;dr
If you’re a young rockstar or rocketsurgeon looking to break into tech, you should give this a read because it’s what most startups are realllly thinking when they post a job.
for starters
Our founder routinely spams our Slack with articles, tweets, and posts — which I read EVERY ONE OF christian g. Occasionally, one sticks and the other day this 💎 started a convo about the merits of writing.
First, if you don’t know who Intercom is or what blogs or VC twitter are you might already be in the wrong place. Also, as of writing, we don’t yet have an investment (or any interest signal at all) from Brianne but she seems awesome, you should follow her on VC twitter (…and we’d love to chat 👋 about lmbk).
To get ahead of the wave of pings + nudges from our ceo, I figured I’d start working on a post sharing some of our/my thoughts on what we look for in team members and what we mean when we look for fit.
Since we encourage our interns to share openly about their experiences and pride ourselves on a strong culture of not asking anyone to do what we wouldn’t be willing to do ourselves… here goes.
a crash course in startups in 99s or less
I’ll start with why we ask team members to share their inspo about lmbk. As a startup, we’re operating in a World 🌍 where nearly no one knows we exist. Of course our inner circles hear all about what we’re building but most folks have never heard of us let alone have any clue what the heck a lmbk is — or how to pronounce it. Despite this stealth mode, we still manage to get a tonna interest about working at a cool startup building amazing things in emotional intelligence. And for the record, we are admittedly total badasses 🍑.
One thing folks who haven’t worked at a true startup might not pick up on (I know it took me a hot minute) is that a big problem we’re trying to solve is visibility and traction across multiple channels. Sure, we’re trying to build something people want and will adore, that makes the world a better place 🤩… But we’re also trying to raise the necessary capital — read: chase + woo investors like Garry Tan — to stay alive. All while recruiting the best and brightest go-getters to come design the future with us, against all the odds of failure. Sound like fun? Read on 👇
Selling these narratives under normal conditions (that is non- pandemic, impending global economic collapse, eroding privacy, etc…) is difficult at best but as you might imagine, finding folks interested in working their asses off can turn into a pretty vexing challenge.
a few key takeaways i wish i’d known
Still with me in the burning room? Awesome. Having mentored and interviewed over a dozen people since beginning my epic journey at lmbk, I worked hard to pull together some of the key dna 🧬of who/what we’re on the hunt for in an applicant. Below are a few nuggets that often come up when we’re reviewing the hundreds of applications we get each month from talented startup aspirants. These pointers and skillz are what we (and most other venture-backed startups) are actually seeking:
💚 + 🧠 (SHOW US SOME)
Did you already sneak into our super secret beta? No? Then why not get on the list and invite 5️⃣ friends to our early access? Have you been following our progress + interacting with us on twitter and insta? Show us some love + shout us out from the rooftops + stan us online. 💯 best way to show that you value our mission + causes and that you’re dialed into what we’re building. See thread 🧵below from @ shl.
🦾 FLEX THAT DIVERSE INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
Want an awesome crew at a rad startup to want to work with you? Be intrinsically motivated and showcase what makes you diverse. Maybe you love designing experiences + building apps. Maybe you’re into sneaking around urbEx’ing and taking photos; Maybe you’re a recovering mountain climber + extreme sports fanatic; Or perhaps you’re developing robots that control brain’s in your spare time. The point is: find ways to get motivated doing things you’re passionate about with amazing people and be motivated by forces other than financial compensation to pursue those passions. It shines through and we literally always ask how that influences the way you work. But showing versus just saying is 🗝.
💬 TALK IS CHEAP
Take time to SHOW and demo what motivates you with your actions and what you’re all about (and yes, this means on social media + the internet). Here’s a few ideas on what we’re talking.
If you’re a(n):
designer 🎨 build out an insta that links your projects to your dribbble page showing off your style + inspo
engineer ⚙️ put apps you’ve built on a site (preferably with a blurb/docs/codepen on your motivation) that 🔗s to your git profile
product person 🧰 show your passion + understanding for tech/trends/data on twitter that links to your pico, medium, or blog
growth person 📈 build out a cms and throwup your profile on angellist that redirects to your ⭐️free⭐️ hubspot
scientist 🔬 add your publications to google scholar + microblog — in language everyone can understand — about your work on reddit, twitter, or insta
trust ya boy when I tell you we’re going to check all these places — and many more when you reach out for a gig. or go a step further and make our lives easier by sharing 🔗s to these places in your message!
🤩INTRINSIC MOTIVATION >> EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION
In case you hadn’t heard, things are a little sketchy in the economy rn. So, if you’re in early career mode (like moi) + looking to join an early stage startup, here’s how you should be thinking about work at a startup
peek the thread in there (yes this was also shared with us on Slack 🙄) along with this gem from Garry T’s insta if you’re a video person 👇
We all gotta eat, let alone pay down our hellacious student loan debt but trust me: the leadership skills + wisdom you’ll learn at a startup are far more valuable than delivering for uber or waiting tables.
@me if you’re more experienced + salty.
🌈 YOU OWN YOUR DISCOVERY…
Ever heard of this awesome thing called the Internet? Google?! Turns out, we’re all now a part of that and there’s a ton of insights to be had from taking a peek at our activity there, here, over there, and occasionally even here. The moral of the story is: be curious and learn more about who you’re trying to make a commitment to work with because if this becomes a❓for us you’ll likely get passed over.
🧫 LEARN FREELY + EXPERIMENT
If I knew about the vast world of tools used to build the internet a few years ago, I’d be on a different trajectory today. We live in a world of freemium-ish products designed to delight users into either 1️⃣ paid subscriptions or 2️⃣ feedforward loops that capture our attention (ads 🕳). What does this mean for you? As an aspiring startup’ineer, there are SO 👏 MANY 👏 opportunities 👏 to learn. Not for bags of money, but virtually for free. On top of that, most of these free/cheap tools have amazzzzing docs + tutorials that are far better than Microsoft Office leads us to believe. You can learn amazing things on the internet, for 🆓!
💡SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF + GO DEEP
Growth opportunities are abundant at startups where the founders + leadership are all hands on deck to find product market fit. This means that a lot of the work will require groking new skills and rapidly iterating on things that aren’t working. I’ve learned to wield (and teach) design, dev, comms, and devops and many more and it’s addicting. Deep diving and being a Jill/Jack -of-all- trades is a must. The deets matter immensely, but so does speed. In the biz we call this polishing and following all of the above should set you up to rock in your startup role.
📈 TELL A SCALABLE STORY
As a startup, we’re looking for growth minded people. It’s certainly not for everyone and we own that (see above). Just like investors are seeking a change function in our progress, ops, team, userbase, and revenue 🤑we’re seeking diverse, intrinsically motivated talent who seek scale from the get go. Find ways to share your story and emphasize how it changes over time with data, anecdotes, and memes. Yes, memes.
alright, let’s wrap this up…
We all start somewhere and if you’re up for the ride of your life, working at a startup can be an incredibly rewarding hyperloop for your career arc. If this sounds like you, reach out via one of the gazillion ways I threw you above.
but before you go
Thanks to our founder + ceo for the barrage of these Slack insights + [re] writing most of this post… our growing team continues to learn a great deal from christian and you’d be lucky to work with him.
🚨we often include our stack 🛠s in our posts as helpful hints on how we work. The first person closest to guessing all the tools we mention above who follows + slides into our insta DMs gets a $50 amazon 💳 + a sneak peek at our amazing upcoming product release 🚨
