The Tuesday Roundup
Today’s Tuesday Roundup focuses on resources for hiring at startups, particularly in the earliest days.
This newsletter from Andrew Chen gives good insights into the hiring process for an early-stage startup. He details some characteristics of great hires, interview tips, and recruiting advice. This will be particularly helpful if you’re just beginning the journey and need some background.
In his YC Startup Playbook, Sam Altman has a great section all about hiring. His biggest advice? Take it slow.
My first piece of advice about hiring is don’t do it. The most successful companies we’ve worked with at YC have waited a relatively long time to start hiring employees. Employees are expensive. Employees add organizational complexity and communication overhead. There are things you can say to your cofounders that you cannot say with employees in the room. Employees also add inertia—it gets exponentially harder to change direction with more people on the team. Resist the urge to derive your self-worth from your number of employees.
For the other side of the hiring process, this article from First Round gives tips for new hires at a startup from industry vets. Whether you’re beginning a job at a startup or wanting to prep a new hire, this should be a good starting point.
Remember — you likely can’t copy/paste from a larger company’s playbook. “Don't over-engineer and don't try to mirror a process that worked for you at a later-stage company. Whether it's systems or processes, not everything you build today will scale 10x, and that's okay because you'll be continually reinventing as the company grows. Better to learn and then pivot and adjust quickly,” says Sylvia LePoidevin, Head of Marketing at Kandji.
Lastly, I want to point back to the TIM Multiple, the hiring framework I introduced in last week’s newsletter. As a reminder, the TIM = Prior Month Annualized Talent Spend / Net New Revenue (ARR). Use the below rubric to evaluate your own TIM.
That’s all for this week’s Tuesday Roundup. Share with a friend and let me know what you think here, on Twitter, or on Instagram.