
What It Takes to Hire 10 Employees in San Francisco - jenthoven
https://www.kapwing.com/blog/what-it-takes-to-hire-10-employees-in-san-francisco/
======
aresant
One item in particular you note is that Recruiters are "Not Worth It"

But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried
that route.

In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First-
degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out.

I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter"
and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role.

Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well
known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates,
and delivered strong hires.

We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis
I can't think of better money that we've spent.

The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering +
reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high
return investment categories in my view.

And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per
hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr
range.

PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should
probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on
boostrapping hiring!

~~~
com2kid
I'll second this, I've worked with a few _really_ good recruiters.

Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing
candidates in a matter of days.

You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch
with great people.

The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked
with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone
immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.

~~~
mandeepj
> got back to me the next day with a phone number

That means when your recruiter will leave - he\she will take your employees
along

~~~
andrewstuart
Boy recruiters sure do have a shonky reputation - is it deserved?

Why the heck would I, as a recruiter, be so willing to shit in my own nest?

Treat your clients - former and present with respect and integrity and you'll
continue to get work into the future.

Value money over good relationships and you'll soon be out of work.

The thing that bugs me is that this is self evident, yet people keep assuming
recruiters would behave this badly.

~~~
mandeepj
Sorry. I will try to balance it a little - a bit of poaching can happen with
each of your employees' departure.

~~~
andrewstuart
If you are not my client then I will happily poach your people till you have
none left.

If you are my client, then I will only find a job for your employees if the
employee in question has already left the company, or if the client has
explicitly said to me "can you find a job for this employee who has left us?"

Rules - there's rules for how to behave with integrity.

~~~
username90
> If you are not my client then I will happily poach your people till you have
> none left.

That was his point, as soon as your client is no longer your client you poach
their engineers on behalf of your new clients. It might not work exactly like
that with you, but I bet a lot of recruiters have no moral qualms about
poaching from an ex-client.

~~~
pyrale
I see nothing wrong with this. Employers are not entitled to their employees.
While bad employers moan about getting poached, good employers make sure that
their employees have meaningful reasons to stay.

In sectors with no such pressure, employees have to pee in bottles just to
shave a little bit of productivity.

------
chillydawg
Having gone on the journey of trying to spend the absolute minimum on
recruiting to now effectively not caring what recruiters charge I think that
paying, say, 15k for a strong senior engineer is a bargain. Stop wasting time
generating leads at a pitiful rate, pay a pro to do it and concentrate on
actually running your team and shipping product.

~~~
bmiller2
My experience has been that HR stonewalls all efforts to use external
recruiters due to perceived cost. Yet at the same time they can’t deliver
quality candidates so a position stays open for 6 months; incredibly
infuriating.

~~~
chillydawg
Unfortunate to be in your position. My solution is to not have HR and be a
tiny company where we can happily ignore that kind of tedium.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “not have HR”

and that’s how you get bully psychopath CEOs sexually harassing people,
infusing their religious / racist biases on the hiring process, etc.

Would much rather have HR + bureaucratic tedium than to be beholden to
unbridled CEO whims.

~~~
wffurr
HR doesn't prevent any of that.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Compared to how it manifests without HR constraints, boy it absolutely does.
Are there examples of these bad behaviors in big companies? Sure, and that’s
hardly the point.

~~~
gentaro
Do you actually have figures to back that up? HR's job is primarily to support
the currently existing power structure.

------
crusso
_I also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in
my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no
reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely
didn’t work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got
one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop
pinging people at her company._

Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an
updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously
disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too.
Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online,
yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have
materialized.

~~~
tomp
I've gotten my last two jobs through LinkedIn (and likely otherwise wouldn't
even know about the companies). Yes, the signal/noise ratio is very _very_
EXTREMELY low, but the variance (all on the upside, there's really no downside
to LinkedIn) is well worth it.

(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was
job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low-
income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly
progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime
soon as I expect the progress to continue.)

------
jedberg
The article says their best channels were friends and referrals via friends.
As Patty McCord likes to say, the first 20 hires are easy, you just hire your
friends and their friends. It's the next 100 that are tough, because at that
point you've exhausted all your friends.

Edit: fiends to friends.

~~~
WalterBright
I usually try to exhaust all my fiends, so they'll stop bothering me.

------
andrewstuart
This article is arguing strongly for the core value of the recruiter - time
saving.

True that founders must spend time recruiting, but this person has essentially
turned the job of company founder into the job of recruiter. Founders should
have better things to do than make the incredible time commitment this person
describes.

OK recruiters cost money, but isn't the founder's time worth something?

>> I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates.

This is not how to do recruiting, it's wasteful of the recruiter and the job
seekers time.

The first interview should be a phone interview and it should be sufficiently
detailed that any in person meeting coming out of it appears to meet many of
the requirements.

If you are doing hundreds of coffee meetings then you're wasting vast amount
of time.

It may sound trivial but the denim thing is signalling "young".

------
p1esk
She preferred people from coding bootcamps rather than fresh CS graduates from
good schools? Does not really make sense...

~~~
ta1234567890
It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or
even to be really good programmers. They just need to have a passion for
constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure
things out as they go, just like all of us do. There's only so much pre-
training you can do.

Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a
job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from
an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will
perform very poorly.

~~~
jstummbillig
> It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or
> even to be really good programmers.

Even more so (and maybe more shockingly) you don't need to be a capable
programmer to get a CS degree. I have worked with people who have master's
degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line
in their life.

And yes, both are teachable -- but then, everything is. It is hard to quantify
exactly how much inexperience in any given discipline hurts the outcome to
what degree, but I feel there is a strong bias towards algorithms over
practical skills, including having worked on and completed real life projects,
that does not correlate well with their importance in common real world
situations.

~~~
bradleyjg
This is an ever green topic that we aren't going to solve here, but for what
is worth my take is that if you find someone that's self taught that
nonetheless knows the asymptotic behavior of the common data structures and
can fizzbuzz that's likely to be a better hire than a fresh CS degree
applicant. Because you are less likely to get someone that "wants to work on
interesting problems" or try to write a new project in Idris on the sly. But
that said if you open the door to non-traditional applicants you are going to
find yourself with a higher proportion that don't know O(1) from busy beaver
and/or can't declare a variable in their supposed language of choice.

~~~
eldenbishop
Kind of funny this came up. I used fizz-buzz in all my interviews for about
two years (at first as a joke). Not a single new CS grad ever solved it in
about a dozen interviews. The best I got was pseudo code like "if (i divisible
by 5) { ... } else if (etc... "

Turns out modulo is not a well known operation.

~~~
bradleyjg
Wow. I was using fizzbuzz as stand-in for basic ability to code problems and I
guess I don't really care if someone doesn't happen to know modulo, but I am
surprised. I certainly would expect modulo to be more well known that left and
right shift for example.

------
situational87
From the photo I'm guessing you started your hiring process with:

1\. Throw away any resumes from old people

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Or this was implicit ageism based on the peanuts salary & meaningless options
comp package.

------
sadness2
Your team appears to lack diversity with regards to age, and your conclusion
makes it sound like that was almost a goal. Older engineers can offer a lot of
wisdom and save a lot of wasted effort

~~~
gwm83
I'd assume they had a salary boundary that excluded experienced individuals
who expected more money.

~~~
bradlys
Seed stage startup. Extremely likely it's not just salary but also equity.

How many highly experienced individuals are going to join a seed stage startup
as a regular employee?

It's founder or no deal with early startups for most people I know above 40.
You join as regular employee - maybe get 1-3% at the high end. Founder? Order
of magnitude more.

------
WrtCdEvrydy
> angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop
> pinging people at her company

LOL, name and shame, I'm looking to poach some people from a place that's so
scared of this.

------
simonebrunozzi
Interesting take-aways. Surprisingly, investors didn't bring any good
referral.

These are the investors from their Crunchbase page [0]:

\- Kleiner Perkins

\- Sinai Ventures

\- Bryan Rosenblatt

\- Village Global

\- ZhenFund

\- Shasta Ventures

\- Ron Drabkin

\- Riverside Ventures

One day it would be nice to really, deeply measure how investors contribute to
their portfolio companies.

[0]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section-
inve...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section-investors)

~~~
delinka
I know VCs like to appear as if they provide an advisory role. I don't know
how many actually contribute more than capital to their portfolio companies,
my guess would be that you have to seek out a reputable company that provides
more than money to get more than money.

------
cosmodisk
The part on recruiters is very so so. $15K in fees,in a place like SF,where
devs don't come cheap, is peanuts. Meeting tens of candidates means a lot of
time spent not doing something else, something more important,so the cost
doesn't become lower. There are some crappy recruiters out there, however a
good one would not just get a good candidate but also save a lot of time.

------
bluedino
Before anyone says "Why limit yourself to San Francisco?", they weren't
looking for a remote employee.

~~~
jimmaswell
Why limit yourself to wasting money renting out pointless physical offices?

~~~
minimaxir
Although the existence of remote work has limited the benefits of a physical
office, physical offices are not obsolete.

~~~
jimmaswell
I say they are obsolete for programmers, video editors, graphic designers,
anyone whose job consists of doing things on a computer.

~~~
the-pigeon
Obsolete isn't the word.

I've worked on remote engineering teams for companies that have their non-
engineering workforce go to an office for the last 6 years.

There's tradeoffs. Remote is much better for some things and in the same
physical office everyday is much better for certain things.

There's a ton of blog posts that have been on HN over the years that go into
the details of the pro and cons.

But anyone telling you it better one way or another in general is full of it.
All depends on the details.

~~~
jimmaswell
The "pros" of offices I hear are always along the lines of "I can't go
interrupt people at their desks." I've yet to hear a comoelling one.

------
jonnycomputer
did you not get applicants older than 30?

~~~
robbrit
From my experience hiring in startups (and personal life experience, having
left the startup world at 28), over-30s have higher salary requirements than
startups can afford. It's not even just a Bay Area thing; in pretty much all
markets you pay a premium for experience.

~~~
PorterDuff
I think I'd be happy to work on something interesting for crummy money. The
trick is the interesting part.

~~~
systemtest
I'd rather take more money, retire in my 30s and work on my personal projects
from that point on.

~~~
PorterDuff
If I was 30+ years younger, I would consider that.

One problem is being old school enough that it's darned difficult to work for
free.

------
graphememes
On average a startup < 200 employees will spend around 15k+ on hiring efforts
anyway. Recruiters can simplify, and streamline the process. Had many high
quality recruits that stayed 2+ years with the company from recruiters.

It is a huge myth that the hiring experience with recruiters is poor. It is a
huge myth that the quality is low.

Find the right recruiter. Get good candidates. The onus is on you to do your
research.

Not a recruiter. Just someone who has worked with some amazing recruiters in
the past. I've interviewed thousands of candidates, hired many of them, passed
on quite a few. Hiring is always the same. Don't make it harder.

------
dennisgorelik
[https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/kapwing)

Kapwing has 1 Funding Round totaling $1.7M

\---

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com)

In the last 6 months, kapwing.com traffic grew from 1.75 M to 3.3 M Total
Visits per month.

3.3 M Visits per month is, usually, a good result on $1.75M investment.

------
gist
When you look at some of the ideas that are being done you have to think that
the idea here is simply the investors are funding acquihire special purpose
vehicle (for lack of a better way to put it). That is they invest in a company
that they know has less than a solid chance of working out long term because
of a good idea (or even forking to a better idea). And they know this. Then
what happens is they have one of their other investments acquire the company a
few years later as well as the fully vetted workforce.

------
iamleppert
Their products are meme generators and what appears to be a frontend on
ffmpeg. Not sure this kind of work couldn't be outsourced for bottom dollar
rates overseas?

------
acangiano
> Remote Hires

> When it was difficult to hire, we considered outsourcing engineering work to
> an external dev shop.

Outsourcing and remote hires are two completely different things.

~~~
jgmmo
This. I expected the 'Remote Hires' section would discuss why they needed a
local dev, and why a virtual/home-based hire would not work. This section
should have been named 'Outsourcing' \- since that is what they actually
discuss in that paragraph.

Indeed, hiring a fulltime offsite employee is very different from outsourcing
to a 3rd party.

------
mLuby
Small nit-pick: Remote hires and outsourced teams are _very_ different things.

Hiring full-time remote individuals is great if your company puts in the work
to be remote-friendly.

Successful outsourcing work to a dev shop (usually remote to some degree)
depends on your ability to communicate your product's technical needs
precisely.

------
akozak
This focuses on hiring channels - but wouldn't an economist recommend
competing on salary/equity or other benefits? Why isn't that a part of the
strategy in such a competitive labor market?

------
Animats
Well, the application, a web-based image editor, is kind of retro. Those go
back to Ofoto, 1991, which became Kodak Gallery. Which failed. Not likely to
become big.

------
ausjke
startup without VC in SF, is this still possible these days?

bootstrapping can happen anywhere but not in SF these days in my opinion due
to cost associated, It used to be a startup in your garage, nowadays it's
called lean-startup with remote peers(sometimes overseas to save costs
further)

~~~
opportune
You say it yourself, you pretty much have to go lean to do an effective
bootstrapped startup, and focus on profitability very quickly. Otherwise the
salary costs will kill you unless you have very deep pockets.

One model that I would like to see more of is a type of co-op, maybe even part
time. This allows you to defer payment in lieu of equity, at the obvious cost
of not having people's attention as fulltime employees, and slower iteration
time. The benefit is that you can actually get FAANG caliber engineers to work
with you since you are paying entirely in equity

~~~
ausjke
physically, to make startup a success out of 99% failure rate, you have to
laser focused with a small capable team to break through somewhere. A loose
team is really hard to make profit before everyone is burned out. Hiring is
painful, or the most painful plus it's super time consuming and distracting,
finding nice peers sharing equity is even harder, harder than finding a wife
on tinder I feel. I don't have better ideas though.

~~~
opportune
I think I would have an easy time finding peers to share equity from my
personal network, although I could only know for sure when push came to shove
and it was actually time to start working. But yeah it could be really hard
running an actual business where everyone is only working 8-25 hr/week.

For it to be viable, you would need to focus on getting an MVP up fast and
reaching ramen-profitability. Then once there's enough money for everyone to
pay their bills, you could start transitioning people to fulltime. Again since
you are sharing equity generously, as long as you find like-minded peers,
ramen profitability for each employee/co-founder is all you need

------
elpakal
> Even though Kapwing is doing well, we didn’t get a single referral through
> our investors

Is this common?

------
glloydell
The fact that the article states the cost of $1000 at the outset is a bit
disturbing given that it goes on to describe the intense amount of time and
effort taken in the search for hiring.

It indicates to me that the person writing this article doesn't consider their
time to be valuable, and raises all sorts of red flags about how they would
value the time and energy of their employees.

Throw in the combination of the shared jean jackets and incredibly forced
(almost desperate) smiles in the Hero/Footer image and the cult vibe is
overwhelming screaming RUN AWAY.

Is this a coded cry for help? Should we rescue these developers?

~~~
glloydell
I'm going to double down on this one. I poked around their site and read the
blog post on their flyer campaign :

[https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-
francisco/](https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-francisco/)

And it ends with this quote : "By the end of our 8-hour workday, we had: - Put
up 352 posters - Spent $96.16 ($31.08 for tape + $65.08 for printing) - Taken
25,497 steps - Walked 11.2 miles - Used over 400 ft of tape"

Nowhere in there does it say anything about the cost of paying the people to
do that work.

They're very clearly and plainly stating that they do not put any value on the
time of their employees.

------
gwbas1c
I wish I knew an estimate of hour much time went into each hire. Specifically,
how much of the founder's (or CEOs, ect) time went into each hire.

------
garbre
Holy ageism, batman!

------
quotemstr
Why San Francisco? Of all the tech cities in the country, why choose the most
overheated and the worst managed? Seattle is right over there.

------
rsynnott
> We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts
> with probably hundreds of candidates

Must’ve gotten a discount on the coffee.

------
pugworthy
Am I the only person to search if "What It Takes" was the name of a new
startup?

------
OrgNet
"free housing"

------
chrismckleroy
oof, jean jackets

------
gunnihinn
> [Cold outreach] Rating: Not successful. Kapwing’s most senior engineer said
> that he gets multiple cold emails from recruiters daily, so it seems
> impossible to cut through the noise.

You are the noise.

~~~
GVIrish
I think the thing that a lot of people doing cold outreach really don't
understand this. Pinging someone on LinkedIn with, "Hey we have a job!" is not
differentiating you from the other 10 people that contacted that person this
week.

But a good engineer already has a job. What makes your job's value proposition
attractive enough that this gainfully employed engineer should engage with
you?

One easy way to set yourself apart is to tell people what salary range you're
working with up front. A good senior engineer is probably already getting paid
well, so if your salary range is attractive, they're much more likely to
respond. If they're not getting paid what they're worth, you may get their
attention immediately. If your salary range is too low, your response rates
will reflect that.

Beyond salary, find a way to communicate the most attractive and unique
features of the job up front. Don't start with, "we have PTO, health
insurance, 401k, etc." because almost everyone offers that. What sets your
company apart? What about the work is compelling and interesting?

~~~
p1esk
To me it's different when a founder/hiring manager contacts me about a job,
rather than a recruiter. On LinkedIn ~90% of job messages are from recruiters,
once you filter them out, not many are left, and I typically respond, even if
with just "Thanks for reaching out, I'm not available currently".

------
codesushi42
Problem: What does it takes to hire 10 employees in San Francisco?

Solution: Don't hire in San Francisco.

And not limiting your hiring pool to hip millennials could also help.

~~~
moltensodium
They forced the one guy who is over 30 to post and say he's over 30, so they
managed to fight their age discrimination with a 31 year old.

This is the most unintentionally depressing post I have read in a long, long
time. I really don't think I can keep working in tech much longer.

~~~
codesushi42
Followed by a flurry of downvotes that are undoubtedly from HN accounts at the
company.

------
croisillon
I'd never get a job there as I have no denim in my wardrobe

~~~
andyv
I had the same thought, but then noticed that the jackets are company jackets.

------
sodosopa
“We spent less than $1,000 on hiring

And “I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates”

The real cost is over $1,000 unless the value of your time is $0.

Also, as someone else commented. So out of hundreds you interviewed, it
doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired. What did the age breakdown look
like? Ageism does exist in tech.

~~~
dcolkitt
> it doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired

Not that I don't agree that age discrimination exists in tech, but this could
just be an artifact of startups in the Bay Area.

North of 30 is when people tend to settle down and start a family. That's
enormously expensive in San Francisco. My guess is that most over-30s in tech
either A) decamp to a lower cost of living metro, B) have very high-paying
FANG jobs that startups can't compete with, or C) are independently wealthy
from prior ventures.

Either way they're not showing up to a relatively low-paying, very high-risk,
low-security startup job based on the outside chance of their stock options
hitting it big. Lottery tickets don't pay the mortgage or pre-school tuition.

I think the underlying issue isn't so much age chauvinism as geographic
chauvinism. Why do blank-slate companies continuously insist on basing
themselves in the Bay Area? There's no shortage of talented engineers in
Columbus, Philadelphia, Huntsville, Dubuque or Boise. Certainly enough for a
dozen-employee seed-round.

~~~
compiler-guy
The author worked at Google prior to founding this startup. Presumably Google
Bay Area. So they founded a company where they were, and where their contacts
were.

Yes, they could have moved out of the area, but that has its own costs, not
just financial.

------
homonculus1
>matching corporate-logo-patch jean jackets

ew

------
PunchTornado
surprised that the fb ad was worth it. don't know any devs that us fb, let
alone click on their ads.

can a startup like that pay bay area salaries?

~~~
sodosopa
Maybe that’s why they’re outsourcing a bulk of their work.

