Founders Guide: Thoughts on Wartime Hiring

(Note: this one is from the archives, originally written back in April 2021. It’s presented without much editing, so it’s a bit rambly at times. The primary audience was my team at SOOT, thus the use of first person plural.)

Objective

This document acts as a journal entry of sorts, that describes Amol’s miscellaneous thoughts on hiring at an early stage startup.

Wartime Hiring

Wartime means different things to different people. For me, it’s any period before being profit positive. I don’t mean ‘profit positive’ as in, we have green on our books; I mean ‘profit positive’ as in, we are making enough money from our core area of expertise that we can spend money to grow in other places and expand our hold on the market we are in. Until we reach that point, we are dependent on other people because we will not be able to throw money at problems. This is war.

Unfortunately, engineering hiring at a startup is like permanent wartime, even when things are going well. It's tough to compete with the crazy offers from FAANG, especially FB and Goog. There are things we can offer, like responsibility and flexibility. These are important filters. We don't want people who don't value these things. But we also need people who can then take that responsibility and flexibility and use it wisely, which is highly sought after and will result in more competition from FAANG. So maybe this is a wash.

Things that make this harder: early startups are often in stealth. People who we talk to will have little idea of whats going on coming in, beyond what we tell them. So the uncertainty going in for valuable engineers is pretty high, and the opportunity cost is equally high for the people on the other side of the table. We have to convince other people that we're awesome. Even if we have warm intros.

Wartime extends past the hiring table. Talented engineers have many opportunities, and can easily be poached. This is something we should be very scared of (see Losing People below). Each lost eng is more than lost talent; it's wasted onramp time and dead code and bad for culture and... So we need people who are sticky, who will remain loyal and excited through war.

Building in an exciting area is helpful. A certain class of people will be inspired by this alone. But Google, Deepmind, FAIR, OpenAI, etc. will both be tough counterpoints. I mean, that's why I went to Goog to start, instead of a startup.

What convinces people to stay during war? A few things. Culture (see below), is a big one (Google). Patriotism and love of the idea is another big one (Google, again). Love of the personality in charge (Steve, Elon, Gates) is another one. But I think band of brothers is the most important. Excellent people stay in places that are shitty, like really really shitty, when they feel they owe those around them. Soldiers fight for god and country but when the bullets are flying they are fighting for their brothers next to them. It's hard for people who love us to leave us, even when things are bad.

(There is another thing that would convince people to stay during war, which is investment in the future, but as time goes on the equity tradeoffs might matter less and less. In particular, we can expect a dip in talent as the company grows from 10 to 100 employees -- this is a range where the newcomers don't get that much equity, but success also isn't that guaranteed)

We leave wartime when the factors above no longer matter. Specifically, we leave wartime when the experience of being an employee is enough to be sustaining, and employees do not have to look past to other things like love of god and country and brothers. This happens when we are financially stable, i.e. do not have an end of runway in sight, which in turn only happens once we have product-market fit. At that point, we are ideally successful and well known enough that we can pull people in on force of brand and network effects alone.

Losing People

Google pays a ton of money to people who basically phone it in every day. Why? Because that person wrote some code at least once, and having those people around is useful. This indicates how expensive technical debt is to Google, worth > 200k per year. Every engineer a startup loses is super expensive because of a huge amount of lost time in dealing with leftover code. Technical debt extends past actually written code. It also includes shared knowledge. When a person leaves, they take with them the extensive background of things that worked, things that didn't work, and the understanding of why and how.

Each person who leaves is also a severe hit to culture. If people are staying out of love for each other, each person who leaves weakens the loyalty that keeps everyone else in place. So to the greatest extent possible, we don't want people to leave unless we decide that it has to happen (and we need to be careful about this if the rest of the team is really invested in that person).

Losing people also has a potential reputation hit. Talented people who leave us because they are unhappy will share with their friends. These things spread, and it's hard to break a reputation once it's earned (whether good or bad).

Culture

Culture plays many roles in a company. It influences product development. It impacts strategy. It dictates what kinds of investments we take. And, of course, it influences hiring and retention.

Culture is really important to keep people around. People don’t form interpersonal bonds out of nothing -- culture is vital for ensuring that people actually stick to each other. In some ways, culture can be seen as the shared foundations that help people become close. Friendships arise out of a soup of spontaneous repeated interactions -- a good team culture should serve to make those interactions happen, and make them positive.

But what is it about a good team culture that brings people together? In my view, shared language and experience. Everyone has had the experience of meeting a stranger and discovering they went to the same <school, college, hometown, vacation, whatever> or have similar interests in <movies, books, coffee> or whatever. That instant connection ends up being the base for a much deeper conversation, and then a friendship. For startups, this means helping people create memories with each other. That can be through experiences (e.g. offsites) but it can also be through developing in-house memes, using internal words and verbs that only make sense to employees, giving out ‘uniforms’ (e.g. swag), and having shared rituals.

To start, building a team culture will be tough. We currently don’t have physical space and are remote. Besides a few interpersonal preexisting relationships (which have pros and cons) we don’t mostly know each other at a personal level. There is a wide gulf in ages. As a result, the first few engineers have to be pseudo-founders. People who are willing to put in work in developing the culture (and being excited to meet people) just because. People who know a lot about everything or are willing to learn. People who inspire others through personality/technical competence.

Over time, we can relax the needs for individuals to be culture founders on their own as the culture itself becomes self sustaining.