For founders who have a startup idea — but few engineering skills to make it a reality — making the team’s first technical hire can be a daunting task.
Nontechnical founders will face greater challenges when it comes to sourcing and recruiting engineering talent, but another factor that raises the stakes: They must often act quickly to find someone who could very well end up with co-founder status.
We interviewed a handful of startup founders and technical leaders to get their thoughts about how nontechnical founders should approach the hiring process for engineer no. 1.
Their advice spanned how to handle technical interviews, sourcing technical talent, how to decide whether your first engineering hire should become CTO — and how to best kick the can down the road if you’re not ready to start worrying about bringing on an engineer quite yet. Everyone I spoke to was quick to caution that their tips weren’t one-size-fits-all and that overcoming limited knowledge often comes down to tapping the right people to help you out and lend a greater understanding of your options.
I’ve broken down these tips into a digestible guide that’s focused on four areas:
- Sourcing technical candidates.
- How to conduct interviews.
- Making an offer.
- Taking a nontraditional route.
Sourcing technical candidates
Knowing what you’re looking for obviously depends a good deal on what you need. Founders have more flexibility if they’re just aiming to get engineers on board so they can get an MVP out the door, but technical expertise is only part of the equation if you’re aiming to hire for someone that may end up being a co-founder or CTO.
“This is a relationship, you have to treat it like dating,” Settle CEO Alek Koenig told TechCrunch. “If you want to get married immediately with someone for the next 10 years, get to know them, work with them, definitely talk to their friends, make sure you feel comfortable making that long-term commitment, because I think a lot of startups fail because of co-founder conflict.”
Your CTO doesn’t have to be the grandest technical mind at your company, but they need to command respect from and be someone that attracts new hires.
“CTOs, generally, can be really technical and attract people to the company that way, or can be really good, I would say, socially or politically and be able to attract people that way.” Jyve CTO Sam Purtill tells TechCrunch. “I think founders need to kind of know what they’re getting themselves into. They either need to be one or the other at the very least, they shouldn’t just be some, like random person in a basement.”
If you’re building something that will need the best of a certain class of engineer, sourcing someone with deep knowledge of a particular platform or language is probably the route you’ll want to take, as opposed to bringing on a generalist.
“Either could work, but you would probably rather have someone with specific knowledge or specific expertise, especially if it’s in a language that you think people are excited about,” Koenig says.
Nontechnical founders can be at a disadvantage for sourcing engineering candidates because they often have fewer connections in that world. The best solutions here are afforded to those with deeper rolodexes at their disposal.
Bringing on technical folks with whom you have worked closely with in the past is obviously a preferred option, but founders may also find it useful to lean on early investors to help them court talent. If they don’t prove to be a big help here, you can also bring on dedicated advisors.
When you’re completely new to the tech industry or light on industry contacts, sourcing desirable talent can be a much rougher prospect, but sometimes the best thing to do can be to scour networks like LinkedIn for an ideal candidate who hits the right notes before sending them a pitch that appeals to their good will and curiosity.
“Doing some cold outreach, saying like I have an idea and I’m looking for a co-founder and whether you’re interested in being a co-founder or not, I would love to just pick your brain on the technology,” Evergreen co-founder Sundeep Kumar says. “I find that you get a pretty high response rate.”
How to conduct interviews
“When you’re a startup, I feel like the first part of the interview is you just trying to sell the candidate the opportunity,” Jyve CTO Sam Purtill told TechCrunch. “And so I always try to take the first one or two conversations just to get the candidate really psyched so that they’ll actually make it through the interview process. That’s my entire goal.”
Nontechnical founders might not be able to determine whether someone actually knows their stuff, but for candidates that look good on paper, there’s plenty of room to focus early conversation on vision and determine whether they’re a good culture fit for your leadership style.
“I’ll be the first one to say, I cannot judge technical talent,” Koenig says. “I’ll definitely be part of the interview but maybe more in a closing role. I have so many other things to do so finding time to be part of deep technical recruiting isn’t something that’s best for the business.”
Founders should use their conversations to determine whether the candidate is someone who they can share their vision for the company with and communicate clearly with.
“I’ve seen multiple situations where it was difficult for the CTO to communicate with the other founders. I think those situations rarely work out,” Purtill says. “If they [don’t] know how to communicate in plain English what they’re working [on] or how they’re building stuff to nontechnical people …that, to me, is a huge red flag.”
Selling the vision for the company and getting a sense of how you would work with a candidate is probably the best use of your time, but it’s also key to get a sense of whether the candidate is technically adept. You will likely want to bring in someone external whom you trust to tackle the technical interview.
Scoring access to those advisors can be a challenge if founders don’t have them in their network. Again, a clear solution is tapping early investors to make referrals from their networks who can act as official advisors with defined roles.
“One thing I wish we had done was bring in advisors for very specific capacities early on, like here’s 25 bits of equity and you’re just responsible for helping us make smart back-end hires,” Kumar says.
Advisor assistance also doesn’t have to be quite so official. Purtill says he often looks to technical friends who have different areas of expertise to help him make up for his own blindspots in the hiring process.
“I pay them like, anywhere between $200 to $500 per candidate and I only send them the candidates I really like,” Purtill says. “I structure it where they would do a technical interview where they would give them a project and then basically do a write-up of the person where they assess if they like them or not.”
Putting in the extra work will not only help determine whether a candidate is legitimate, but can also show how serious you are about sourcing the right candidates for your startup, Purtill says. “It makes your company look more attractive because it shows you’re actually serious about finding the right person.”
Making an offer
There’s obviously a premium on the market for engineering talent that can also manage a team, so don’t be surprised if your first technical hire requires quite a bit of persuading to come aboard your risky proposition. Ideally, you’ll have made enough of the sell on the company’s trajectory to get them excited about the direction, but once you get them excited about scale, you’re likely going to have make an offer.
You have to look at what they’re bringing to the table. We’ve written in the past about co-founder compensation. Another tough decision can be how much equity to give the first technical hire.
Some candidates will place an outsized weight on titles, and dangling co-founder status might be enough to push candidates over the edge even if the equity slice you’re offering out isn’t a one-to-one match to the existing founders.
“If it’s just like two people working on an idea, and then you’re bringing on this person to build everything, it’s literally like, a cost-free way to make someone feel very invested in the company,” Purtill says. “At least for me, I would not join a two-person company as a CTO and not be a co-founder. That just sounds dumb.”
If you are determined to offer co-founder level equity, you have to decide how important this hire is to the stability of the company and put the appropriate weight on your own experience and contributions.
“It kind of depends on what the CEO brings to the table, if the CEO can bring a $2 million seed round together by calling three people than yeah, the CTO should not get half of the CEOs equity, it should be more like one-fifth,” Purtill says. “But if the CEO is, like, fresh out of Arizona State starting their first company then the CTO should get more like two-thirds of what the CEO does, or something like that.”
Making such a substantial bet on such an early hire can be nerve-racking, but while making the wrong choice here can certainly set you back, equity vesting schedules will help you avoid disaster.
“[Having to rehire a role] can definitely set you back six months, but, you know, if you start to get a sense that they’re not the right fit … everyone has a four-year vesting schedule and especially with that one-year cliff, if you have doubt then there really is no doubt. Cut bait and move on,” Koenig says.
Kicking the can down the road
Bringing a first technical hire aboard can be a daunting challenge, and oftentimes nontechnical founders may opt to take a nontraditional route that allows them to sidestep the stress.
Kumar ended up pushing off making his first technical hire as long as he could while building LoftSmart, a rental marketplace for college towns. Kumar and his co-founder ended up outsourcing product development to an offshore team in Spain while he and his stateside team of a half-dozen employees focused on operations and partnerships.
“We didn’t really have a choice, like we were trying to talk to people and trying to get smart technical people that we found to join. We didn’t necessarily have the grandest product vision when we were doing that … it was just kind of throwing around the term platform a lot,” Kumar says. “So you ask yourself, do I want to try tackling something I really don’t understand like bringing in a first technical hire, or do I want to go with a shop that has a team with a series of companies they’ve worked with that I can reference check.”
LoftSmart coaxed plenty of investor interest, raising nearly $19 million, but at a certain point the team had to “pause and rebuild the entire process” when they hired a new technical lead, Kumar says. Fast-forward to present, and Kumar is working on his second startup, Evergreen, a jobs platform for the unemployed that’s currently in stealth. This time, he opted to hire a CTO as soon as he raised his first dollars.
“Having development overseas is great, but they’re working on 20 other companies. They’re not always invested in the long-term scalability and sustainability of your product,” Kumar says.