Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join Curious how others find early stage startups to join. Thinking first engineer that a startup is hiring to maybe first 20 employees. |
Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join Curious how others find early stage startups to join. Thinking first engineer that a startup is hiring to maybe first 20 employees. |
I had 10-15 people i was working with (not all employed) at my last startup and they all came through my network either directly (ex colleagues) or through trusted parties.
Again it’s mostly a trust thing more than anything.
I think a good strategy is to get close to the kind of startups you care about without (before) direct intent to join. It’s easy to hang out (or at least it used to be) through various events, meetups or co-working places.
Many startups I didn’t join and could have been good, I’ve met through open-source (Hadoop, HBase, Mesos, etc.) these are companies like Cloudera, DataBricks etc. when they were tiny. I still miss that crowd, years later.
So it’s mostly a matter of being close to what’s happening, able to filter and ready to jump when opportunity arises.
A lot of VCs also have job boards, or they will list their portfolio companies and you can reach out directly:
https://jobs.sequoiacap.com/jobs
https://kindredventures.com/portfolio
etc
There are also plenty of early stage startup job offers on the Ask HN: Who is hiring threads (here’s the latest one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757794)
The above can be hard to navigate, but there are some recommended tools in there that scrape the listings and make them searchable
Lastly, you can also try this CLI tool that uses AI to match your resume and preferences to job listings scraped from HN and a couple of other sources: https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs
Oh, and you can also attend startup meetups, a lot of times you can meet the founders in person and they might be looking to hire (that’s how I first got into an early YC company)
2. Late stage funding is dry, early stage funding is cheap now. It's been three years of "winter is coming".
3. Even without the equity, you're positioned to be in a good place with the right growth.
To me, it's just riding the wave instead of complaining about the wave.
HN “Who’s Hiring” threads (great for early opportunities straight from founders).
AngelList / Wellfound for more structured job boards.
Direct outreach - if you see a product you like, email the founder. Early teams usually respond well to proactive people.
It’s less about waiting for a job post and more about finding projects you’re excited about and reaching out early.
I’ve been the founder in this position, and I’m confident in my ability to judge talent, so I don’t worry too much about the risk of hiring a BSer. I know that if I want to hire someone then they’re qualified. But at what price? Once I’ve decided I want to hire them, the cost of passing — and restarting the cycle — is too high to push back on high counteroffers, especially when the investors are pressuring us to hire fast.
(fwiw, my next startup I will avoid raising any money until we have product/market fit… or at least I’ll tell the VCs pressuring me to hire too early to pound sand… this rushed hiring was a big contributor to the soft failure (acquihire), but I am proud we built a very strong team. For all our missteps and failures, hiring was not one of them.)
In my case, I was simply invited by people who already know my ability. I don't even actively find it.
2. Portfolios of great angel investors and VC firms.
3. Emailing people you admire, eg investors, founders, or engineers.
4. Write down your friends and past and current colleagues who you think are a) most likely to be successful and b) you’d most enjoy working with. Or even just who you most like, trust, and admire. Then see where they work. And ask them about other companies they know. The simplest version of this is go on LinkedIn, and browse your network, and click to check out the companies all of your past classmates and colleagues work at.
5. Go to events that would have interesting technologists in your field (ie the areas where you have skill and taste, so you can pick who you admire), and ask them where they work, and which startups they’ve been impressed by. Talks, conferences, meetups, maker spaces.
6. Biased self-promotion: I’m kind of obsessed with interesting startups and sometimes share lists of startups, eg https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957834156794343730 and https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957446016950816866
7. HN who is hiring thread: there are lots of interesting ones there, you’ll just want to dig through to find them.
8. Look up university career fair company lists to see which companies are hiring, if they’re hiring new grads and interns then they’re very likely hiring senior engineers too.
9. Podcasts: some technologists have great podcasts, so do some investors and VC firms.
10. Search for startups founded by alumni from your school, you’re more likely to have alumni second degree connections there.
I’ll note that investors get many bets, employees get one at a time. So you need a higher bar. Meeting in person is particularly high signal.
My tip for filtering companies is to spend as much time as possible in person with the team before accepting an offer, ideally at least on 3+ separate occasions, with 3+ separate people. If there’s doubt, skip. This is also why it’s so good to start by identifying your most impressive friends and colleagues and see where they work, because you start with that high trust filter.
Source: I work at an early stage startup.
So basically through your network.
Then go to the company’s website and look for postings or email them and tell them you're interested.