Action steps:
- Write job descriptions for your openings.
- Promote them through a few channels and get first responses.
People around you
Have smart, capable and driven people around you years before you start your first company. Get into a great high school or college, move to a big city, move to the central city of your industry (New York for finance, Silicon Valley for IT, Paris for fashion). Get involved in professional communities.
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. — Jim Rohn
Look for friends with successful projects in your industry. What kind of events and places can they go to? Are there such people at all in your city? Should you move? If there are no big successes in your field, get together with successful people from other areas.
How can I be helpful? Ask this question whenever you meet an inspiring person. Learn how to be uniquely useful for smart and driven people around you.
Co-founders
Most companies are started by one founder or two co-founders. Teams of three and more are rarely equal, there is a leader or two and others cover some functional areas.
Think Jobs and Wozniak, Allen and Gates, Ellison and Lane, Hewlett and Packard, Larry and Sergei, Yang and Filo, Omidyar and Skoll. — @Naval
Getting an idea first and then looking for cofounder is a weak strategy. Hard to find, hard to convince, easy to break up. Instead, do “co-founder trials”. Whenever you see a person you like as a possible co-founder, try to have a super short project with them. One day to one week. Not necessary a professional project, it can be a picnic for friends a join blog post, or a one-day class you co-teach. Just do something together. Over time, you build a list of 5 to 10 people you’ve done something interesting with. Now, when you finally decided to start something, recruit your co-founders from this list.
Once you have a partner, write your co-founder agreement (e.g. as a shared Google docs file):
- Ownership split. Non-equal splits are very common. Come up with something that both of you feel good about. Consider contributions to initial capital, job market value of each co-founder, and time spent working on the idea before the start of the company.
- One co-founder leaves. Discuss this scenario on day one. Can the staying cofounder buy back the shares from the one who leaves? At what price? All shares or just part of them?
- Functional responsibilities. Who is responsible for what? Who controls strategic decisions? How do you resolve disagreements?
- Salaries. Financial compensation including bonuses, dividends and re-investment can be discussed a bit later. Synchronize your general expectations and figure details later on.
Whom and when to recruit
Seller and builder. The key activities at the start are talking to customers and promoting the product (selling) and creating the product (building). You need to cover both these competences in your initial team. It is very rare for a company to succeed without a strong seller as a co-founder. Selling is learnable.
Which co-founder is a strong seller or is committed to learn sales and marketing?
Full-stack seller. The “selling” co-founder is, in fact, responsible for a long list of activities: positioning, copywriting, naming, product definition, mailing lists, in-person sales, recruitment, and investor relations. It is normal to start without proficiency in these skills. The real requirement is to enjoy these activities (over building a product) and learn them really fast.
Product team. The first version can be build by some combination of co-founders, employees, contractors, and outsourcing firms. At your first company, it is important to have short term focus during the first three months. Do not hire anyone for long-term perspective. There might be none. You have a budget, a product definition and a deadline. Hire to make it happen. Once you have a sustainable product on a market, you can rethink the whole team.
Short-term focus. Experienced and well-funded founders can hire for long-term on day one. This does not work for newcomers. Pre-product, unfunded project with unproven team can not attract best people anyway.
Hire for immediate impact.
Have this expectation clear with everyone. Align your compensation with short-term results. When you have nothing, spend money on money-motivated contractors who can build the first version fast. Once you have a winning product, there are more opportunities to build a great long-term focused team around it.
Job description
Objectives. Describe job responsibilities in a short bulleted list.
Requirements. Include both professional and cultural requirements. Completed projects in similar fields is the best indicator that a candidate can make immediate impact on your project. Do not list secondary and discriminational things like education, age and gender.
Motivation. Why candidate should choose your company? Describe your culture, mission, professional development opportunities, salary interval, bonuses and equity compensation.
Do not be anonymous. State the name of your company and include a website. State interval for salary and equity. Provide the name and personal email of hiring founder. Nobody is interested in opportunities like “a promising company is looking for an engineer, apply to learn more”.
Test drive your job description. Show to other people, how can it be improved? How does it compare to other job descriptions on the marker? Google for best job descriptions in your field.
How to find great people
Candidates can come from everywhere:
- Search within your network. Ask for recommendations from employees, contractors, investors, and users. Write a post on social networks with a direct link to your public job description.
- Move your best contractors to full-time positions.
- Browse portfolio sites like Dribbble and Behance.
- Consider employees from competitors. Look for recently failed or failing projects. Look for recent graduates in your field.
- Make it easy for your visitors to discover job opportunities on your site.
- Use job advertising. Look for job boards in your local professional communities.
Process
Recruitment is a process. Write a job description. Find candidates. Filter, interview, and give trial tasks. Then make a decision.
This article is a part of Earlydays, an open guide for first-time entrepreneurs.
Written by Yury Lifshits — yury@yury.name — @yurylifshits
