There is no shortage of resources on the internet about hiring for startups. A cursory Google search of the phrase “startup hiring” led me to uncover an article from Greylock, an interview with Forbes, and a mountain of Medium articles within the first 50 search results. However, when I added the word “undergrad” or “student” in front of my search query, the results were non-existent. Every link that came up was about hiring interns during COVID-19 and the latest tech company to cancel their summer internship program.
Unlike hiring full-time employees for a hot startup with established product/market fit, hiring students to work on an early-stage venture while they’re still in school adds layers of complexity. There are a plethora of nuances that are important to recognize, and having gone through the process of recruiting engineers and designers for DealDock, I thought it would be prudent to consolidate a few of my learnings into a resource for other founders.
1. Find “Nexus” People
This is important regardless of whether you are searching for co-founders/employees on your own campus or elsewhere. I’m going to define “nexus” people as the folks at your school that are tapped into all parts of the entrepreneurship ecosystem. These are the people that, when someone at your university launches a new venture, will be the first to hear about it because they are tangentially involved with the business, or because one of their friends is. I find that “nexus” people come in two varieties: VCs and founders
The VC “nexus” people tend to be involved with Dorm Room Fund, Contrary Capital, Rough Draft Ventures, or your local flavor of aspiring Patagonia enthusiast. They are constantly attending pitch events, networking the hell out of everyone, and have a Rolodex filled with “value-add” hires. These students may not connect you with star engineers right away, but they will have a great sense of their local venture environment. As an example, my team and I were looking to add an engineer at a school we didn’t have a presence in, and I began my search by talking to someone in the VC ecosystem there. This individual gave me an amazing perspective into the commitment levels of a good developer, the number of gimmicky startups that are constantly trying to poach talent, and the intensity of other club commitments. This ultimately led me to refocus my search on other campuses where I could uncover untapped talent with less competition.
The founder “nexus” people are my favorites. They know everyone, have witnessed generations of campus-born startups grow and die, and have gone through the painstaking process of hiring undergrads themselves. These folks are always at the entrepreneurship hub on campus (and never seem to be in class), always have a new side-project, and love meeting new founders. If your campus has an on-campus incubator program, it’s very easy to find these individuals.
2. Hiring for Commitment and Skill
This piece of advice is pretty obvious; you want to hire committed people who have the skills to drive your product forward. The reason I emphasize this, however, is that commitment, especially at the earliest stages, plays a larger role in determining whether your startup survives the first 6 months.
While in school, we have to make intentional decisions about the paths we pursue, and the easiest path to let go of is a startup. The most common reason I’ve seen university startups fail is because the founding team gets caught up with midterms, frat parties, and a ton of other clubs. Unlike midterms, working on a startup in college is entirely self-driven, there’s no one setting deadlines and no one to answer to. If you’re searching for a co-founder, look for people in your network that first and foremost complement your skillset (technical vs. non-technical, engineering vs. operations, product vs. design expertise). Once you’ve identified the ideal skillset for a co-founder, screen the potential list of candidates based on their current obligations (other jobs, clubs, etc.). This first hire is the most critical one you make, and a lazy/busy co-founder is almost certainly a death sentence for your budding venture.
Commitment can also screen for the people that believe in your company vision; the ones who are willing to work on the business after graduation. If you truly believe in the idea, find a co-founder who feels the same way, and never compromise on motivation/commitment for the sake of superior skill or a personal relationship. We’ve pursued great engineering talent, but ultimately passed on developers who didn’t view the business as more than a 5-10 hour/week commitment. I’ve also passed on onboarding multiple close friends of mine because they didn’t feel the same way I did. Despite all the mistakes I’ve made with DealDock, this was one piece of advice I’m glad I followed.
3. Equity- it’s all arbitrary
This is one of the most fun games to play at an early-stage startup. The product hasn’t been built, there isn’t a single customer, and no one has done any real work. Yet, the co-founders are already bickering and bargaining over a meaningless share of an imaginary pie.
50% of a $0 valuation is still $0. I tend to follow Vinod Khosla’s advice for dealing with equity. If you believe you have the right founding team, if they are committed to making the company a success, compensate them as such. Divide the equity pretty evenly among the first few hires, granted that their skillset and commitment warrants such a split. Large egos shouldn’t be welcome at any stage, but especially as it relates to equity splits at the early-stage. Treat this as a business issue, rather than an emotional tie to the company. At the end of the day, you want the founding team to be made up of folks that aren’t motivated solely by their piece of the pie, rather intrinsically motivated by the company vision and the problem you’re solving. If you’re the first co-founder, don’t get greedy about your share of the equity, it’ll set the right tone for your leadership style going forward. This was a very recent lesson for me.
4. Make sure everyone does at least 5 customer interviews
The first step in founding a business is need-finding. If you have a thesis in mind, validate it with a series of customer validation meetings/calls. We did about 60 such conversations with a variety of private equity firms before brainstorming our first feature. Every team member you onboard should also have a granular understanding of the customer and their needs. While a review of your prior research may help, it’s critical that every new engineer, designer, salesperson, and operator lead problem validation calls to get a sense of the ecosystem your business operates in.
This piece of advice comes from a mistake I made in the early days of DealDock. My co-founders and I did the bulk of the need-finding calls, and as the team grew, engineers and designers alike turned to us for direction on what customers were looking for. Reading our research memos wasn’t enough to develop customer-centric products. We didn’t require that everyone conduct customer interviews of their own, and so there was a certain level of “tribal knowledge” hidden among the 3 original co-founders. We solved this by building a series of resources and interview documents for our team to read, but ultimately, our team members were only able to develop autonomy during the development cycle when they went out into the field and conducted their own research.
There comes a point when you start hearing the same needs over and over again, so the customer validation conversations need to evolve as your business grows and pivots. However, the underlying need to conduct these interviews will never go away, and so it’s critical that everyone is involved in the discussion. This is especially important in college, because lets face it, no one my age is really an expert in anything other than binge drinking. The only way to make up for a lack of industry experience is to immerse your team in the mindset of a customer.
5. Hire when it hurts
If you have an intriguing/exciting idea, people will immediately seek you out to join the team. There are plenty of people on every single college campus who constantly chase the hottest university startup. Earlier, I discussed tactics to weed out the right candidates, but when do you hire them?
In this case, I find that a classic silicon valley adage is most appropriate: hire when it hurts. This is true even when you have students working part-time on your product. Unnecessarily bloating your team with a variety of individuals ultimately slows you down in the long-run. Keep your team lean and only hire for specific roles when there’s a glaring gap in the capabilities of the existing team.
I’ve thought a lot about the pros and cons of taking advantage of “free” startup work in college, and the thousands of students who work without compensation for the sake of getting experience. From both a fairness and team culture standpoint, don’t fall into the comfort of overhiring cheap labor in the short term. At the early stage, your work should be focused on a few key problem statements, and the team size should reflect that.
6. When you hire, don’t add a middle management layer.
This applies to all aspects of the business, but most importantly to the hiring process. There is some merit to a division of labor, but because making the right hires are so integral to the team’s continued success, you should empower all members to be a part of the hiring process.
If you’re the CEO, your job will mostly be picking up odds and ends that no one else has time to do. Some days it will be sales, some days it will be design work, and some days it will be finance or HR. As the de-facto HR officers at a startup, the co-founders are in charge of the hiring process. However, if you’re hiring a backend engineer, make sure your front-end developer is in the interviews. If you’re hiring a salesperson, make sure your designers are in on the conversation. At some point, it makes sense to have most of the team meet and vet any serious candidates you have. Like I mentioned before, each hire will be critical to a team’s success, and in a high volatility environment like college, a cohesive team is even more critical. There can be no weak links and interpersonal conflicts, and the best way to ensure that is to increase the number of relevant team members involved in the hiring process. As an added bonus, it empowers non-co-founding team members to take on additional responsibility.
As a general rule of thumb, its good to avoid middle management. Keep an open line of communication and don’t add unnecessary layers to information sharing within your startup.
Conclusion
These takeaways are all derived from mistakes I made and advice people shared with me. As you seek out new co-founders, grow your business, and make tough decisions as a founder, I hope this resource will serve as a guiding document for some of the challenges on your journey.