
Startup Recruitment for Founders - miraj
https://rocketshp.com/startup-recruitment/
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throwaway2016a
I find it interesting if not a little disconcerting that the equity table has
the startup hiring a COO at 2% - 5% equity but no CTO and the closest it has
listed is "Lead Engineer" at 0.5% - 1%. I suppose there could be a VP of
engineering under that chart since it doesn't specify what type of VP.

This article seems to be propagating the myth that engineers need MBA types
more than they need engineers.

The article also advocates heavy contracting.

Speaking from experience, if you are contracting out most of your software
engineering and don't have a CTO type role who knows what good code is and
knows how to manage the contractors, you are in for a really bad time when you
do decide to bring on full time software engineers. You risk overpaying and
risk having completely unmaintainable code that doesn't scale with your
business.

Conversely, much of what a COO does can be done by the CEO at early stages.

Of course, no two startups are the same. In fact, a bad CTO can be more
damaging that not having any. Which is why it is important you screen your
hires well. However, your milage may vary.

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hkmurakami
a bit offtopic but -- imo technical folks don't need MBAs. However you _do_
need a person who can sell. That person might have a technical background,
might happen to have a MBA (though frankly very few MBA types are very good
salespeople), but honestly the skill is orthogonal to anything else.

The question you ask an engineer is "can you build this?". The question you
ask a business cofounder is "can you sell this?"

~~~
mgkimsal
so true. to get a bit pedantic, there's generally no 'business' to
'administrate' in the early days, so an 'MBA' is... not specifically useful.
To the extent an 'MBA' is useful, it's probably in doing things that are
tangential to the degree itself.

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ryandrake
A curious bit:

> Rookies: Won’t always request equity, Experienced: More likely to request
> equity

Is this really true? I would think it's the opposite--the rookie has not yet
felt the sting of swapping salary for worthless equity and would be more
likely to value equity higher, whereas the veteran will know better...

The whole section on equity convinces me that I'm not joining a start-up any
time soon. 1-3% for hires 1-5? Fractional percentages for everyone else? What
a joke. That's what passes for early-stage equity? These are the people who
are literally building your company. People seem to be falling for it though,
and start-ups seem to have no trouble hiring, so who am I to argue?

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hkmurakami
The veteran knows that equity is something you can negotiate hard for and is
very negotiable.

Regarding equity comp for early hires, presumably the founders have already
done significant derisking by finding initial product market fit, secured
initial capital, built a prototype, have buyer interest/commitments, etc.

Every time I see complaints about single digit % compensation, I wonder how
many of the people complaining will go out and actually put in the work of
validating a market and getting the initial momentum for sales and meeting 100
"investors" and "pseudoinvestors", put in years of networking to even be
loosely connected to the money network, getting 90 rejections to get your
first $500k, and the shitwork of setting up a corporation and doing all this
work out of pocket in exchange for 10x the equity. I mean literally no one is
stopping you from setting up a company that you own 100% of the equity of.

~~~
UK-AL
This post hightlights the real barrier to entry for startups. Being connected
with people with the money.

It's normally the people with best connections and the best relationship with
investors and not the best product market fit that can get funding.

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spajus
> Ask them if they’d like to have a quick phone call

And that's how you fail to get introverted people interested. I'd have to be
deaperatelly pissed off at my current position to want to voice chat about
"great new opportunity" without getting all the details in writing first...

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escherize
A wise move to write a guide like this as content marketing. The key market
for rocketshp appears to be early stage founders. This is a problem faced by
that segment for sure.

~~~
a_imho
Searching shows up ~nothing for rocketshp or Mark Hayes, I would take their
opinion with a big grain of salt.

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a13n
Typo in the first sentence...

> Has your startup has reached the point where you need to make your first
> hire?

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it_learnses
is there a guide on how to hire reliable contractors if you're too busy
currently to work on your saas product?

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modahepsi
İnteresting

