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June 08, 2007
How To Hire For Your Bootstrapped Tech Venture
Famous founders know a think or two about hiring for their ventures as Marc Andreessen illustrates in a highly readable post on what to look for and how to identify it. One contrarian view of his is that super intelligence is not in the top criteria.
Today we also have some insights from some euro startups that we have on our radar:
Spotify:
Long ago, we learned a lesson by asking the first guy we knew with a driving licence to join our band (disaster!). These days we pick our team members very, very carefully. Most people we've hired ended up meeting us at least three or four times, but considering we see each other almost every day that's really not too bad. We enjoy each others company in and out of office, and social happenings are plentiful.
The fact that Spotify's founders are famous, as is Andreessen, must go a long way to aid recruiting the kind of talent required, but what about bootstrapped ventures that can't offer relatively big salaries and the founders might not yet be famous.
Once again, we have a couple of tips from some of our readers that are bootstrapping ventures and building good teams...
From the founders of struktur (the company behind spreed.com): We have hired engineers [after] having the opportunity to meet and talk at conferences. I also contact individuals directly when I find an interesting publication, a software or a blog. Recommendation can be also help a lot in finding good people. Social networks like LinkedIn can be goldmine in digging-out the personal background of a successful candidate. Before we contract engineers it is important for us to take a look of the past work and the quality of the software. Of course, this is easy for Open Source developers.
Andreesen also points out that once you have the talent on board, you have value the people so they stay.
Adoos, a bootstrapped clone of Craigslist out of Spain, has had success recruiting in Argentina, attracting early employees with a chance to experience two summers a year. And as it has grown the founders show their thanks by providing better gear to work on and by taking its engineers on holidays to the south of Spain. We'd say that Adoos is executing on the "valuing" part of the equation that Andreessen talks about.
Posted on June 8, 2007 06:17 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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