S1 #3 Founder Tips

Tips For Founders On How To Build Early-Engineering Teams

Over the years, I've had the privilege of engaging with founders and sharing valuable insights with them on building successful early-engineering teams. In this blog post, I'd like to share a few of these insights on how founders can effectively build early engineering teams for their startups.

1. Craft Your Superhero Story

I cannot understate the importance of crafting a compelling story for your startup! As a founder, it's essential to identify your superhero story - what sets your company apart and makes it an exciting opportunity for potential hires. 

And, it's really quite easy to do! Here's a framework I like to use:

• Reflect on the challenges you're trying to solve with your startup

• Compel yourself to think about it from a superhero's perspective

• Use this narrative to attract top talent!

See how easy it is? Having a superhero story helps because it inspires your candidate to either consider your startup as a potential workplace or recommend you startup to someone else as a potential workplace - it's a win-win!

2. Hire the Best Possible Talent

Captain Obvious, right? But, you'd be surprised how many founders lose sight of this! Often, in a hurry to hire someone quickly or cheaply, founders will settle for someone who is NOT the best fit for the role. And that can have a disastrous compounding effect on the startup later down the line.

So, it's crucial for founders to prioritize hiring the best possible talent for their early engineering teams. This includes setting high hiring standards, implementing a rigorous interview process, and defining the quality of individuals you're looking for. Here's how you can achieve this:

• Define benchmarks for the person you're looking for and stick to them!

• Implement a tight interview process with a rubric for acceptable answers.

That's it! 

You'll quickly find that just adhering to the rubric will filter out candidates that you won't 'settle' for. Sure, this might take a bit longer but I promise you, you will come out TONS better at the end of this grueling funnel!

But, where do you find the "best possible talent" anyway?

Well, that's where this next tip comes in!

3. Leverage Your Network

Yeah, a recruiting agency like 1st10 is specifically designed to find such candidates for you. But guess what? The absolute perfect candidate might actually be in your 1st or 2nd degree connections on LinkedIn!

And, finding them isn't very difficult, honestly.

• Step 1. Sit down (with your co-founder, if you have one) and align on the qualities and standards you're looking for in potential hires.

• Step 2. Go through your contacts to compile a list of candidates for your early-engineering team.

I guarantee you, you can draw up a list of 50, maybe even a 100 candidates who fit the standards you have set in step 1. And, yeah, of course 1st10 can do this for you! Just connect with us here - and WE will mine YOUR network for these perfect candidates!

There are several more insights that we've shared on a recent episode of the 1st10 Podcast. Do listen and let us know what you thought of it!

And if you found value from any of these tips, we want to hear from you! If these tips have helped you achieve improvements in your recruiting efforts, reach out to us. We'd love to have you as a guest on our podcast to share your success stories and insights with our audience.

Here's hoping you find the perfect early-engineer for your startup!

About Us: 

1st10 was founded on the simple philosophy that there is nothing more important to the success of your startup than the first ten engineers you hire. Because the first ten will impact the next ten and any wrong misstep can be the difference between success and failure. 1st10 works with visionary founders and exceptional engineers to build world class engineering teams.

1st10 was founded by Boris Epstein, original founder of Binc, the firm best known for pioneering embedded recruiting in Silicon Valley. Binc built early teams for Pinterest, Ripple, Stripe, Square, Airbnb, Reddit, Tesla and many more. Binc was acquired by Robinhood in 2021.