

Hiring Techniques for Early Stage Startups: How to Get Your First 3 Employees - eladgil
http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/02/ninja-hiring-techniques-for-early-stage.html

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jhuckestein
Here are some other tips from our experience in no particular order:

\- At least in Germany, you can get amazing interns for free from the
university b/c their programs often require them to do one.

\- Don't justify to your potential employees why you are entitled to "the
best". Just ask for the brightest people around and they will come, because
they know that if you were not smart, you would not want to employ extremely
smart people.

\- Be multicultural and try to have at least one girl in your team ;)

\- Don't blindly hire your friends. If things don't work out it will get
messy.

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eladgil
These are really great tips! :)

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hga
This guy knows what he's talking about; everything he said matches my
experiences, especially his final item on how hard it is to land the first
employee (I've experienced that from both sides).

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kls
I stopped reading at the Ninja reference, but as for as far as I got, I
disagree with the assumption that you can not find someone through an
investors network. I am good friends with principals in a few VC firms and I
am most certainly the idea man when they have a new venture and need
technology help. I don't like managing people, (any team I assemble are self
managed individuals) but I am the kind of guy that can scale a company from
the first server to Google they know it and they recommend me all the time.

~~~
eladgil
I agree that there are some people well networked with VCs that are strong
individual contributors. I think there are specific venture funds/investors
who go out of their way to know such people (I mention two of them in the
blog) but there are also many VCs that mainly know "future VP engs" - some of
whom are happy to get their hands dirty, but most of whom want to manage
rather then write code...

