

GroupTalent - Hire Effective Teams. Not Individuals. - ghempton
http://grouptalent.com
We built GroupTalent based on our realization that we were most effective when working together as a team. We decided to build a community that could promote software teams and expose them to new opportunities. In terms of being an X for Y, in its current state, GroupTalent is an AngelList for dev teams and companies. Please give us some feedback!
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T_S_
Hey teams, charging a premium? Watch out for the zombie unbundlers. They are
everywhere and they are relentless. Remember, your split is not a Nash
equilibrium. Swear an oath of allegiance to each other once a week.

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thetrumanshow
Whoa there, can you expand on this a bit?

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T_S_
You and I are a team. We charge $200 per hour with an equal split. The
unbundler comes along and whispers in my ear. He says I'm better and he can
pay me $105. Of course, being awesome (and human) I agree with his assessment.
He says I must keep quiet about this. Easy to agree, since I know you won't
like it. Then he tries to get you for $95 or less. The bigger the group, the
better this tactic works. The more complicated the scenario, the better this
tactic works. A variation of this just happened to me this week.

~~~
thetrumanshow
Ah, so I'm assuming "zombie" was just a cute adjective then (as opposed to
being an industry term)? Either way, thanks for explaining.

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T_S_
Sorry, I was just using it to mean the relentless, unenlightened people who
just might pop the bubble of team spirit without caring about the
consequences. Not an industry term in this context.

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credo
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/technology/18talent.html?h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/technology/18talent.html?hp=&pagewanted=all)
has a report on how some companies are hiring teams.

They acquire a startup for its employees :)

An excerpt _"It was widely reported that FriendFeed was bought for about $47
million, or about $4 million for each employee, though some money went to its
outside investors."_

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paraschopra
This is one of the ideas that make you kick yourself saying: "Why did I not
think of it first?"

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Alex3917
There are going to be a lot of subtle difficulties with execution, but the
concept itself is brilliant. It's easy to see how this could basically become
the next Wal-Mart by enabling user generated talent monopsonies.

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gaius
Isn't a "team for hire" a "consulting company"? What am I missing?

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jacques_chester
It's framed in terms of a current theme of discussion here at HN ("Some
companies are bought for their team!") and therefore, it's revolutionary.

Reinventing old institutions with cooler names is one of the primary outputs
of Silicon Valley.

In fairness, sometimes really subtle changes can make a difference. Let's
watch.

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ianl
Interesting idea, hiring a team like this could have its drawbacks. For
instance, what happens when they want to leave? You have a segment of your
work force leaving with domain knowledge all at once.

It seems really good for teams, you get to pick your co-workers (at least some
of them) and you can negotiate larger compensation packages as a group.

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dxbydt
The real drawback isn't the team leaving, its groupthink. I think we've all
experienced this firsthand at some point in our lives, especially when we're
getting hired for the first time - you walk into a room with the entire
programming team. You are a stranger, but the team know each other. The team
has agreed upon a common methodology, a common programming language, a common
framework, maybe they all use vim on the Mac. You walk in & say something
stupid like, Hey guys, lets just do this in xyz language, you open your
windows laptop & fire up TextPad & next thing you know, you're getting those
weird "hey he's not really a part of our team" look. Then you pretend like you
hit the wrong button and quickly bring up cygwin & they heave a sigh of relief
:)

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keithnoizu
This. I deal with this kind of sentiment daily after switching from lamp to
work here at microsoft.

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Luyt
I heard some Microsoft employees own and use iPhones. Isn't that frowned upon?

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andywood
Lots of MS employees have iPhones, or use Google in the course of work.
Responses vary. Fellow enthusiasts may give you the high-five. Your peers, and
even younger managers might give you a light-hearted ribbing. Old-timers might
give you a ribbing that's jokey on the surface, but actually a bit
disapproving. Higher-up executives may actually indicate to you that it's a
career-limiting move.

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jyu
This could be a great alternative to Odesk/Elance/etc. I've done a decent
amount of outsourcing ($X00,000) and some projects are much more suited to a
team that knows each other than a group of individuals.

And past just doing group projects, this could turn into a linkedin for
developers, where you could inquire about dev X from people who have worked
with him.

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JakeSc
If I have a great team, we're not going to work for someone else. We're going
to start our own company.

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reinhardt
Not every great hacker team wants to deal with marketing, sales, bureaucracy
and other chores of running a company.

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mcdowall
Nice idea but why can't I view example teams before signing up? Something
along the lines of Softfolio would entice me in more before leaving.

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ghempton
You can view us, the founding team, here: <http://grouptalent.com/teams/1>

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Flenser
It would be nice to be able to search for teams with specific skills in a
location without having to sign up and see how many results there are.

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ssharp
This sounds great until an entire group leaves your company to join another. I
guess if you reap the benefits of hiring an entire team, you must willing to
endure the loss of that entire team as well.

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stevejohnson
I love the idea, but as usual, I have gripes:

* The team URL is bland. We are grouptalent.com/teams/61, but can't we be grouptalent.com/teams/hackthology instead?

* It wasn't clear what the "submit for approval" button was for, so one of my team members pressed it before he should have while we were entering data.

* Entering education is a bit cumbersome. My team is made of EE and CS students from CWRU in the BS, MS, and PhD programs, so our education section looks pretty weird.

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ghempton
Appreciated the feedback.

* I agree and we will most certainly add this feature.

* Currently we manually approve all teams and companies. After you submit you can still edit your team so no worries. We will think about the flow.

* Profiles are something we are going to be constantly iterating on and we'll think of something to make situations like that smoother.

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UncleOxidant
So what about a team of people who have not worked together formally in a
company before? I know several people who attend various programming and user
groups around town (in this case Portland, OR) and there are some I'd really
like to work with and I think we'd work well together as a team. Is there a
way for a team like this to form?

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ghempton
Yes, there definitely is. We are trying to structure the team profiles to
capture types of experience like this.

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musingvirtual
Hi! I'm wondering if you're recruiting only for developers or for teams that
might include developers but also folks in other specialties - for instance my
team includes a front-end developer, a project manager, a graphic designer, a
3D object modeler, and a web writer (yes, before you ask, a team this diverse
obviously rotates based on project needs and we each have substantial
crosstraining).

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whather
Currently we're aimed mostly at teams of developers but we support any team
who can launch a software product (which usually requires a developer). Your
team definitely sounds like it could be a good fit.

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JVerstry
Cannot agree more with 'hire effective teams over individuals'.

And, when having to chose between high competence meeting minimal expectations
on team spirit/communication/people skills versus the other way round, ALWAYS
choose the former.

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mrschwabe
Curious about the plans for a revenue model. Are they going to charge teams to
list? Or charge companies to find them?

The big challenge with any outsourcing platform is to retain recurring revenue
from existing customers - because the problem is that once two parties connect
with each other and do a successful project, they can just as easily contact
each other direct thereafter; without any need for the middle-man.

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whather
The plan is to eventually charge companies to find teams. It's true that the
site might be a single use for many companies (leave once they hire a team)
but I think that's a common problem for any recruiting site.

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mrschwabe
Sounds like a decent way to do it. With that model, you might experiment with
'sliding scale' plans - by offering more expensive packages with access to
more teams (and perhaps more relevant teams; ie- location).

And a little more input on your revenue model: I think you want to go
subscription, but make it long term to justify a relatively high initial price
point (since you have to maximize that initial transaction due to the little
problem we discussed above). Might be best to just make all plans 1 year. It
simplifies things; and then you've got a decent probability your customers
will renew again year after year.

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ARolek
This is a great idea. Often when I do projects through Elance I bring in team
members to supplement different parts of the project. It would probably be
beneficial to have a point of contact for each project as communicating with
clients takes a ton of time. Otherwise one person turns into project
coordinator and misses out on the fun stuff ;-).

Overall I love this idea and wish you great success! Keep it up.

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amalag
Wow, great idea, this provides great value. I hope it is enough of a
differentiator to other similiar sites.

No patent? ;-)

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mfowler
Very well done guys, looks great and really speaks to how work in general is
becoming more like how movies are made...Someone pulls expert teams together
with certain needed skill sets, everyone kicks ass on a project, disperse, and
repeat on the next one.

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kwamenum86
Feels like a feature rather than a product e.g. LinkedIn Groups. Great idea
though!

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geochap
Interesting idea.

I tried to fill out a team profile but had problems. Now keep getting "We're
sorry, but something went wrong." when I try to login. I guess I'll try again
later when the Hacker News rush has passed.

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ghempton
Will look into this. Did you use oauth?

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geochap
Yes, same results whether I try logging in via email or via linked in.

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sbecker
Got an error when I tried to sign up as part of a team. No OAuth, just
standard sign up fields. Seeing standard rails error page. "We're sorry, but
something went wrong."

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sbecker
Still got confirmation email. "Confirm my account" link worked, and I'm into
the site. Confirmation email is a little stark though, it should be fleshed
out a bit more. Only way to tell it was from grouptalent was the from address.

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spencerfry
This reminds me of someone hiring Pivotal Labs for their dev work.

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rubyrescue
great idea. oauth login w/linkedin failed

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whather
thanks, will look into it

