Somewhat Verbatim Conversation with a Startup Recruiter

http://blog.galler.io/startup-dialog

by sgustard • 13 years ago

158 70 13 years ago

blog.galler.io

electic• 13 years ago

The founders are taking all the risk, getting slammed by investors, and probably have put in more hours and more capital than you ever will. Zoom out a bit and their chances of failing is 90%.

The people that are very successful today all started somewhere. Many of them started at a startup, built something, and made a name for themselves. In their 30s, they are now in demand execs who have proven track records of building out teams and products.

At the end of the day no one is going to give you 50% of a company, not test you to see if you can write code and think logically, and not check to see if you are a good cultural fit in an early stage startup. It sounds like this a huge issue for you so you have two choices:

1. Go do your own startup. 2. Turn down the job and work somewhere else. 3. Go work for some mega-corp that pays you well.

In the end, you are just spamming the board with your pointless posts.

hga3• 13 years ago

The above is a strawman, e.g. where did you get the "give you 50% of a company"?

This recruiter is throwing out a lot of red flags, from being in stealth mode (frequently if not generally a company killer, something I've observed first hand), to not having much respect for the recruitee, which suggests he won't get much respect if hired.

Although his apparent dislike of coding on a whiteboard is a red flag if I put on my interviewer hat; if he can't prove he can code one way or another, you don't hire him.

chetanahuja3• 13 years ago

I am the founder of an engineering intensive startup and I've always detested "write code on a board" interviews for their apparent uselessness(1) and awkwardness. There are better and more pleasant ways to ascertain engineering suitability (including coding ability in realistic coding conditions)

(1) now backed by google's data http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

sgustard• 13 years ago

That would be excellent copy for their "Jobs" page.

statusgraph• 13 years ago

I get your point, but the difficulties startup founders have to endure are irrelevant to the value proposition they make potential employees.

to3m• 13 years ago

Ah, thank you. I'd written about 200 words, going round in circles, and still not quite got to the point that you've summed up in 20.

I suppose that seeing the situation turned around might help convince people of the truth of the maxim that when selling a product, you should set your price according to the value it has to the purchaser, not what it cost you to make...

hnnnnng• 13 years ago

You make valid points but his are more valid. Certainly the reward should reflect the risk taken but at present the reward is horribly skewed in the direction of founders + investors. Employees, who are extremely important, get much less in return. Founders + investors end up with ~ 85% of the stock while the first 10 employees have 14% at the time of an exit/ipo, despite the employees having joined anywhere from 3months to 1 year after the founders. This is ridiculously skewed. Where did you get the number 90%? If the founders fail, does that not mean the employees failed too? All said and done, at the end of the day, the founders can claim stuff like "founded something. got so far and failed" and they'd still be worshipped. What can the first 10 employees claim? "Wrote some code"?

Do not jump to respond aggressively without any actual thought.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

This is an oddly defensive reply. I don't get the sense that this is an attack upon the basic premise of a joining a startup or startup life/risks. I think it was an attack on the approach taken to joining this startup. A fairly one sided dialogue laced with some posturing and arrogance. There are much better ways to do it.

ironchef• 13 years ago

"The founders are taking all the risk" No, they're not. One could just as easily work at a stable job. Instead, they're taking a bet on the founders' vision.

"getting slammed by investors" That's their job. They need to grow up. As an engineer, we get slammed by other engineers. Criticism is a good and necessary thing.

"probably have put in more hours and more capital than you ever will" Capital yes. Hours is debatable. Early stage employees can surpass the hours a founder is putting in.

"Zoom out a bit and their chances of failing" As are yours then as an early employee.

I think the line of risk and effort between founders and early employees is slim...and the tilt of rewards is heavily slanted towards the founders. That being said, it largely makes sense as they founders have done (typically) a lot of proof of concept work as well as handling a lot of the dirty work (HR, initial sales, fundraising, etc.).

adammil• 13 years ago

This post is relevant because it demonstrates how some founders' extreme narcissism is experienced through the eyes of others. The recruiter, embarrassingly, could barely put two sentences together to explain why anyone should care about that opportunity.

TallboyOne• 13 years ago

You've been downvoted so many times I can't even read you're text. That is pretty much a new record I've seen on HN.

coenhyde• 13 years ago

I presume you are a founder. There are a lot of people who disagree with you. It would do you well to reflect on why. If these are your thoughts on founders and early employees I can't see you attracting and retaining the best talent.

burgreblast2• 13 years ago

Agree. Only I would say:

"I presume you founded something. That means you take risks. Don't over-estimate yourself, because you may just be desperate, and therefore more willing to take risks. Or you're a gambler. Either way, founding a company isn't exactly a badge of honor.

If your idea/company isn't getting traction it would do your well to reflect on why. Others have given you clues. You may disagree with them, but you still don't have traction. Why not? Being angry won't help improve your idea or convince people to help you, with talent or advice. Of course, perhaps your idea/company just won't work. The typical case is that no one wants what your startup is trying to sell. Refine, repair, pivot or move on. "

kenster07• 13 years ago

I, for one, was taught about the peril of hubris, by my parents and teachers. Not everyone was so fortunate.

jasonlotito• 13 years ago

As someone who has founded a startup before, not much of this is true. In fact, it's pretty much all just hyperbole and disinformation.

Regardless, I found this part amusing:

not test you to see if you can write code and think logically

The article you are commenting on doesn't suggest that you shouldn't have to write code during an interview. Quite the opposite, in fact.

check to see if you are a good cultural fit

Oh, and this doesn't mean what you think it means. Let me put this another way: it doesn't mean professional. In fact, it instead values the opposite of what that word implies.

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

It sounds like this a huge issue for you so you have two choices:
1. Go do your own startup. 2. Turn down the job and work somewhere else. 3. Go work for some mega-corp that pays you well.

man, that looks like 3 choices.

ryanmcbride• 13 years ago

This post reminds me a lot of David Thorne: http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html

sczkid• 13 years ago

I couldn't stop laughing at the "yes/no" pie chart.

seivan• 13 years ago

Woah, this guy is actually for real.

co_pl_te• 13 years ago

Hilarious. But one point of contention.

"It's like twitter. Except we charge people to use it."

App.net seems to be doing fine sans a time machine.

doktrin• 13 years ago

Not being familiar with his work, is it a known satire or assumed to be an actual exchange?

I'm having a hard time verifying its authenticity. There are at least a few claims (unsurprisingly, by the other party in the exchange) that the entire thing is fake.

triplesec• 13 years ago

It's embellished truth, I believe. Like "Reality" TV, or 100 pieces of Glass or whatever that book was, though a whole lot funnier.

peterjancelis• 13 years ago

Here is the Linkedin from the 'project idea' guy: http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonedhouse

Name and work history matches perfectly.

Edit: Here's a counterarticle arguing David Thorne is a cyberbully: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/funnyman-of...

panther2k• 13 years ago

“Our co-founders travel a lot between TED talks and angel pitches. You understand.”

I do occasionally wonder how some founders have the time & money to travel to every conference/meetup/event on the circuit. I suppose some of them are simply uber-talented and can balance that with the needs of their business... but between coding and talking to customers it's all I can do to find time to sleep or eat (and occasionally read HN ;)).

chime• 13 years ago

In my experience, the business-minded founder runs the circuit generating interest while the tech-minded founder keeps building, recruiting. Both are equally valuable when done properly.

lettergram• 13 years ago

The key is done properly.

jmduke2• 13 years ago

This article is a cheap shot, though my friends' anecdotal experiences suggest that this kind of thing is unfortunately grounded in reality.

The three biggest takeaways, I think, when seeking employment at a startup:

1. Money v. Experience is a false dichotomy.

2. It is worth your time and effort to quantify the actual value of things like free lunches and insurance.

3. Follow patio11's advice on evaluating equity:

Roll d100. (Not the right kind of geek? Sorry. rand(100) then.)

0~70: Your equity grant is worth nothing.

71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits.

95~99: Your equity grant is a lifechanging amount of money. You won’t feel rich — you’re not the richest person you know, because many of the people you spent the last several years with are now richer than you by definition — but your family will never again give you grief for not having gone into $FAVORED_FIELD like a proper $YOUR_INGROUP.

100: You worked at the next Google, and are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Congratulations.

davidcuddeback2• 13 years ago

The funny thing about that table is that rand(100) never returns 100. I wonder if that was on purpose.

jmduke2• 13 years ago

From the source (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...):

Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100).

(Read the whole article, it's wonderful.)

eshvk2• 13 years ago

It is pretty damn well grounded in reality.

Another familiar talking point: working at our startup will be a massive learning opportunity; your twenties and thirties should really be spent learning as much as possible. You can start earning money in your forties.

(

I wonder if this is designed to attract that demographic who went to school primarily to take hard courses because they literally feel like they are not learning unless an external factor challenges them.

)

michaelochurch3• 13 years ago

I think it's best to be earning and learning. You shouldn't have to choose between one or the other. There's no reason to stop learning at 40; many people alive will make it to 90, which means they're less than a third of the way through adult life.

Also, compensation is important. Most people think professional achievement and status beget compensation, but the reverse can happen. You tend to get better projects if you're highly paid, because it's expensive to waste your time on low-end work.

drusenko2• 13 years ago

To be fair, there are good and bad apples in any general population. Startups are no different, and the posted conversation is a complete trainwreck.

In defense of good startups:

1- Some of us pay equal to or more than BigCo, so you're not always making a salary trade-off.

2- Options are a lottery, but with better odds than most people give them credit for: 13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over $50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, which is what I'd call a meaningful exit for all parties involved [1]. Everybody's experience is different, but many of our early employees can attest that options sure can be worth quite a lot.

3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo.

4- The culture isn't soul-sucking.

If you find the right startup, I think you are "optimizing for happiness". Get paid market, be in an environment where you can have autonomy and impact, get stuff done and shipped, and focus on what you enjoy doing.

You don't have to worry about the millions of ups and downs of starting your own or freelancing. And you have a 1/50 lottery ticket of making it big, and a pretty decent chance of picking up some sizable savings.

Obviously, I am biased :)

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...

michaelochurch3• 13 years ago

1- Some of us pay equal to or more than BigCo, so you're not always making a salary trade-off.

True, but BigCo's also have consistent (if meager) raise policies.

With a typical engineer slice, a $10m or even $100m exit isn't meaningful. You might get $10-20k per year of vesting. Even in bad years, bankers get better bonuses (without the tax problems.)

3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo.

Startups win that comparison, no question. A startup doesn't guarantee an impact, but the odds are a lot better.

4- The culture isn't soul-sucking.

There are soul-sucking startups and non-soul-sucking big companies. Cultures tend to regress to the mean with size, so the really amazing and really horrible companies tend to be startups, while all the big companies tend to be somewhere in the middle.

angersock2• 13 years ago

Oh, you're the weebly bro! Cool!

How's business? Any good stories?

moron4hire2• 13 years ago

I see a lot of this assumption of #3 and #4. It has not been my experience. Yes, I was certainly a large proportion of the work that was occurring at the startups I had worked for, but overall I wouldn't say the work was that big of an impact to society in comparison to the sorts of work I was doing at other jobs for large corporations. I've been back and forth between both realms for many years, and all the startups I've worked for were high in idealism, low in through-put, whereas all of the large corporations I've worked for were low on idealism, high on mission.

This isn't to say that I preferred the big-corp work over the startup work--ultimately, I see them as two sides of the same coin of corporate cargo-cultism. It's a rare thing to find a company that respects productivity, be it big or small. But to me, it stands to reason that you're more likely to find it in a company that has a track record of being profitable. I prefer to work for myself now, on my own projects and as a consultant (B2B has an interesting effect of putting you on your "employer's" level. As a businessman, I am now my clients' pier, not their peon. It's a difference that makes all the difference).

But the biggest-impact work I've done in my life was for one of the largest manufacturing corporations in the world. At 25 years old, I had a team of developers and support technicians that I managed for a product that went out to thousands of customers around the world to facilitate them in planning and executing major, industrial construction projects. It was a combination of them giving me a chance because of successes I had in other projects (over a very short period of time, I spent longer just trying to get my coworkers to hang out with me after hours in startups), me taking initiative, and them looking the other way when I bent their rules and delivered results.

Second job out of college. Why me? Because I tried, that is all. And this was not even in the suburbs, this was RURAL. You think you need to be in the valley or NYC or Boston? Please, opportunity is everywhere.

Sure, go be employee #3 at the next bullshit iPhone app. Ooooh, you're using Sinatra and Handlebars and a flat UI. Big whoop. What does any of it mean? Put your balls on the table and show me that you can make an app that works across browsers, going back to IE 6, with a hostile network admin and DBA (who even has a DBA anymore), do it like it was nothing, and not complain about it. "oooh, web standards, boohoo" GET OVER IT! Do the work! Get it done. Preferably NOW!

Go to work for Ford or General Electric or Kellogs and if you just stand up every once in a while and toot your own horn, not expect people to recognize your "clear brilliance" over the chaos of their own lives and just hand you things, then you can do a lot of really great work and get compensated very well for it.

And they're much less likely to ask you to sleep in the office overnight. Actually, yeah, that's NEVER going to happen at a big corporation. They will know for a fact that the only reason you're doing that is to make up for goofing off during the daytime hours and come very quickly down on disciplinary action. You think it's cool your startup employer lets you work whenever your want? How do your friends feel about not getting to see you during normal social hours? Oh, what's that, you don't have any friends outside of work.

Yerp.

dhruvbird• 13 years ago

3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo.

I don't entirely agree. It's possible to do it at BigCo too. You make it sound as if it's impossible. It's probably harder than at a startup, but not the impossible tone you give to it.

jwatte2• 13 years ago

Your table is perfect: you can't roll 100 on a d100 or rand(100) call. My observation: 0-89 is nothing, 90-98 is consolation prize, and 99 may be meaningful if you're an early enough employee. 90+ is meaningful if you're a founder.

GuiA• 13 years ago

Maybe it is intended by the author?... :)

drivingmenuts• 13 years ago

How can it be a cheap shot without a signed NDA, if it's grounded in reality?

tekjeff• 13 years ago

Awesome.

matt_brushlabs• 13 years ago

I'm curious to understand the varying experiences of a technical vs. non-technical candidate, but I also will offer a hypothesis that many startups simply are very, very poor at managing a recruiting process.

Case in point: It wasn't until I began interviewing for business development roles with startups that a dialogue around high-level employment was simply ended with no follow-up.

I had spoken with one particular five-person shop (with a TechStars pedigree and a new wave of Series A under their belt) for a month or so. I had met the entire team and had an incredibly good rapport with the CEO/Co-Founder. We were down to the point of salary negotiations...

...and then, radio silence. That was eight weeks ago. I even sent two short emails every ten days just to see if there was any other insights or thoughts I could provide to help firm up their decision. The emails were ignored; I even bumped INTO the founder one day, and said founder promised to "follow-up this week". That was three weeks ago.

My time as a recruiter for my consulting firm taught me to treat each candidate with empathy and respect (unless they give you a reason not to do so). Unfortunately, by mishandling the process these startups lose not only a potential future employee, but also a potential user and partner in the instance that you have a leading role elsewhere.

moron4hire2• 13 years ago

I've had clients that wouldn't even take delivery of work I had done for them that they had paid for. But that's not just startups, that's everyone these days.

mathrawka• 13 years ago

I can see two main reasons for working at a startup like this...

1. You need an entry level job, and this is a good resume builder

2. You are dreaming of being rich

I always feel that non entry level people at startups like this are getting duped and that makes me feel depressed about the state of our industry.

orthecreedence• 13 years ago

At least our industry hires entry-level people. A lot of industries right now are looking for entry-level persons with 8 years experience.

aaronsnow• 13 years ago

The punch line is that after the in-person interview, they'll take more than a month to get back to you -- and then invite you back for another all-day.

mtanski• 13 years ago

For every opening at a start up like this there is another one at a start-up that pays market rates, offered comparable benefits and gives a fair piece of equity (realizing that there is a tension between salary and piece of the pie).

Hopefully once you're passed 5 employees you have at least some of your shit together. Otherwise it's hard to recruit employees.

phamilton• 13 years ago

What are "market rates"? As far add I know, most startups can't compete with Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Netflix on salary (plus bonus). If market salary is what big cos like Cisco and oracle are paying the I guess some startups pay market rate for a software engineer. But assuming I'm talented enough to join your startup, I don't think it'd very accurate to say I'm being paid market rate when I could get a lot more somewhere else.

joeblau• 13 years ago

That was pretty entertaining story. I feel like almost every interview with a startup that I've done has aspects of this story. It's like "We can't tell you what we're doing but we're gonna be rich."

andrewstuart• 13 years ago

Everyone is so snide about recruiters and recruiting until they start their own company then want to employ people. Then they get serious about it. "We're hiring!"

bifrost• 13 years ago

I have to admit, I've been on this phone call as the person being recruited, a lot. I realized after a while that a lot of the ideas and companies I was being pitched on weren't interesting, especially after I realized that most recruiters know very little about the companies they're working for.

That realization prompted me to become a founder. If I was going to work on a company that was hard to explain, it better damn well be my own, and I better like it.

VeejayRampay• 13 years ago

This is funny until I realized that as a Rails developer in France, startups are pretty much the only option.

Somewhat Verbatim Conversation with a Startup Recruiter

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