Abby Goldstein & Adam Gellert: Hiring Your First Employees as a Startup Founder

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Ehan, I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Super excited for you all to be here. We have a pretty exciting sessions lined up with for you. We have the folks over at Linkus that's going to come and talk to us about hiring your first employees as a startup founder and everything you need to know about it. It's going to be some, some exciting content and obviously we'll open up or sorry, we'll end the session with some networking. In the meantime, you know, we're just getting started. Let us know in the chat where you're where you're coming in from. I see already some person saying that they're in from New York City, and I saw early on Colombia, Romania. So just feel free to use the chat and just let us know where you're coming in from. Okay, Toronto, Atlanta, a lot of Toronto love, that's awesome. Chicago, Detroit, Brooklyn, so that's awesome. All right, so we have about 100 people live right now. I think we got to about 350 people sign up, so we should get a good audience coming in today. While we're kind of getting things set up here, Akshay in the back, do you want to bring on our two presenters today? Because they're the ones who's going to be leading the show. I'll do a brief intro, but I'll let them introduce themselves as well. While Akshay is bringing them up, let me just do some housekeeping as I usually do. As you see, Airmeet is a very interesting platform. On the right-hand side, you will see a Q&A button. Use the Q&A button to submit your questions. You can also use the same button to upvote those questions. We'll do take questions right towards the end. And then once this event is done, feel free to stick around. There'll be some virtual networking. You'll see a bunch of tables and you folks can network with each other. So I hope that's self-explanatory. All right, awesome. We have Addy, sorry, Abby and Adam from Linksys. Super, super, super excited. Feel free to take yourselves off mute. Just maybe tell us a little bit about what we're going to learn about today. In the meantime, I'm going to run a poll so we can also understand a little bit more from where the audience is coming from.

All right, amazing.

Whoever—

yeah, yeah, no, thanks so much for the amazing introduction. We're really excited to be here. This may be my first webinar that I've done in a while, so I'm really excited excited to explore doing this with everyone who has attended. And I appreciate you taking time off your day and I can't wait to share my experiences and all our thoughts with you. Adam.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Ian. We've known each other a long time, friends now, so I really appreciate and I've been fans of obviously Founders Institute for a while now. You know, everything that the community's doing for the future work and, you know, companies that are growing, building a company is super, super hard. And what a way to bring everyone together and, you know, share insights so that people can avoid mistakes, right?

Yeah, awesome. Thank you both. You know, I'm very grateful for the two of you to jump on and like just share your experience. If you folks are not following Abby and Adam on LinkedIn, you're missing out. You gotta follow them. They've cracked their LinkedIn algorithm. I don't know how, but their content's amazing. It's all about HR and all of that stuff, but it's really a delight to read. So Adam and Abby, this is the results. You have a mixture of an audience. You have a lot of people, 50% I would say is in their not launch mode. And then you have a few that are also, like I would say, in the funded and bootstrap. I hope this information's helpful. I'm gonna remove myself from stage. Abby, feel free whenever you, are ready to share your screen and we can go from there.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I see there's a lot of people from all different kinds of stages, so we're definitely going to be able to help no matter what it is. But, you know, specifically, um, this session today is about hiring your first team, although all of these sort of notes can be shown and taken throughout your entire stage. So you can definitely use some of these tips and tricks for the future. Adam, go ahead.

Yeah, so we'll obviously take questions at the end, but you can also write your questions in the comment section, as was noted. And yeah, well, we'll start off by telling you a little bit about us and, you know, why we're here to talk about this.

All right. So, you know, Linkus Group is a high-touch and well-connected HR and recruitment agency. We support companies looking to make a big impact. Linkus Group is really built on one KPI, which is repeat business. We receive a high volume of referrals from both our candidates and clients, and we are constantly on the hunt for the best talent and new companies to work with. We only work with a select few clients, and we do this to provide high-quality support and measurable success. Some of the roles that we focus on are mainly engineering, so software engineering, product management, so product, anything within product, data science. We do a lot of data roles, executives of all levels, operations, admin, sales and growth, definitely in marketing and customer success as well. We work within various industries as well— technology, food and beverage, even advertising, marketing, finance, insurance, all sort of industries. So we have— we come from, you know, various outlooks.

Yeah, so that's a bit about who we are, what we are today. And I'm Adam Gellert, the founder and CEO of The Linkus Group. I Started off my career many years ago as a recruiter, fell into it like most recruiters, and I didn't like the way the industry operated, you know, putting heads in seats, not really partnering with people for a long-term solution in terms of the right fit. So about 15 years ago, I decided to start a company from scratch, bootstrapped, with really the simple idea that we would be successful if we got repeat business from our customers. And whether we helped them hire or they were able to fill the role on their own through our education and recruitment, we did such a great job that they kept coming back to us. And Abby and I have been building that business here today. And Abby, I'll let you talk about yourself for a second. Yeah.

And I'm Abby. I'm the lead recruiter at Linkus Group. I've been here for about 7 years, maybe a bit more. And I help manage and mentor the team. And I also work on mostly technical roles, or at least roles within the tech industry. The tech startup industry is where I really come from. And yeah.

So together we've helped companies go from 1 to 100 employees, grow their team, We work with companies, like why we asked the question earlier, we work with companies stealth mode, maybe your founder that's working out of your kitchen right now, kitchen table, one who has their seed round all the way to Series B. We hire people that need to hire maybe their first developer, their first head of sales, their first COO. These are things that we've seen thousands and thousands of times. So we've seen the scars and we wanna make sure that Founders Institute members don't make potentially the same mistakes. And here we're here to share sort of like all that with you and the experience that we found has paid off.

Yeah. So we have 20 years in recruitment, in the recruitment industry. We've helped about 500 or more startups grow, and we've had thousands of successful hires throughout our time.

Yeah, so of course, CEO of Linkus Group, a high-touch agency that I started. We also are very focused on HR— AI, sorry, HR, I was gonna say— AI and the future of work. So Hire Tipo is our tech product that we built specifically as a marketplace for high-potential candidates and companies that are pre-vetted. So if you want to skip a lot of the sourcing and recruiting process, we've built a tech platform to reduce it, the time it takes to interview your ideal candidate. And then I also started the Talent Help List along with two other individuals, Marianne and Adam. This was like the first sort of you know, COVID layoff list of all the candidates put together. We know that we keep hearing feedback that thousands of people have been hired off of the product and sort of like that open source list. I've also chaired the HRPA for 7 years, which is the governing body around HR, to set up events and new trends that are really important to the HR community. I was also the co-creator of— still am— of Disrupt HR Vaughan. Disrupt is a global HR brand, and we've brought it into Vaughan, Ontario within Canada. People, you know, coming from outside of Canada, Vaughan is just a city north of Toronto that is specifically like a TED Talk-like event, you know, on, for HR people on the future of work. We were also a hiring partner for OneEleven and as well a hiring partner for Mars. So very forward-thinking communities as well.

All right. So to dive right in, are you guys feeling lost in this hiring landscape? Well, you're not alone. Building your team is one of the most, if not the most important things you will do as a founder. There are ways to navigate the hiring market, and we will share the secret tips on how to make it out ahead when hiring your first team.

Yeah, so we're here today, um, to let people know that we understand how difficult this is. Um, you know, we've seen this over and over again. We've worked with founders at all different stages. You know, maybe they've been in stealth mode on their kitchen countertop, no website, you know, really hard to direct new candidates to, hard to be found. Maybe you've got an unconventional product like some of our customers had, you know, we worked with a lot of companies, let's say as an example in the crypto space where it was very risky, product that a lot of people didn't understand at that time, you know, and, and helped a number of them now get to exit. And so maybe you haven't launched, maybe you find it that it's hard to find the right people, maybe you're fighting with, for, for talent against some of like the other bigger companies, or maybe it's smaller startups that you're finding, you know, it's hard to differentiate yourself from all those companies. Maybe you've got no budget and you're trying to figure out, you know, how do I, you know, actually move forward and hire my first person? These are all things that we've obviously dealt with. And then, you know, importantly, like, who do you need to hire right now? You know, depending on the stage that you're at, there might be different things that you are thinking about in terms of who is the right person to bring in at your particular stage. And yeah, we're gonna dive right into this.

All right. So first things first, when hiring your first team, you really got to find your perfect fit. So one of the ways that you can do this is really look for candidates who are aligned. You want to meet the candidates who are actually, who actually want your role. You want to focus on these people who are really passionate about you and your specific mission. Those are the ones that are really going to be that perfect fit and that really align with you. And then don't chase those candidates who are not excited about your vision just because they seem to check off all your boxes. Take a chance on someone who is willing and ready to commit. These are all really important when looking for your perfect fit.

Yeah. So fit is so important from a starting point. I mean, we see people get turned down for the most ridiculous reasons and the company actually ends up hiring the wrong person. They know that. We know that after that happens, you know, based on, uh, a lot of it was focused on their past experience and not their future potential, which we try to, um, navigate and curve customers into, or our clients, into making, um, the right hiring decisions. Um, look, here at, at our company, and we also, uh, let our clients know that the, the, the best way to think about hiring a new person is based on 3 things, which is trust, attitude, and passion. Those are 3 things that you really need to start off with, especially at a startup at any of these stages that we talked about. Passion is so important at a startup. It's really, you know, if they're not passionate about what they're working on or what they're doing or who the team is, that they're going to leave. And the reality is that startups are super hard. So they need to be able to do the hard thing about hard things, right? They need to wake up in the morning and still want to do that. So this all comes down to alignment. That's really what fit is. It's alignment to the particular job that you're hiring for. Somebody that you're hiring might be not a good fit for you, but a great fit for someone else. And we really need you to answer the question, is the person I'm interviewing, the person in front of me, the person that's going to go on the mission with me even when it's hard?

Yeah, definitely. So one of the things that we definitely wanted to talk about is the need for speed. Okay. So fast decisions are key when hiring. You want to move candidates quickly through the hiring process so that you don't lose out and you don't miss out. If the search is taking too long, essentially, then you need to go back to the drawing board and really find out what you're doing and make, you know, start from scratch, essentially. The sooner you make an offer to someone essentially is the sooner they can get up to speed and start making an impact. And so that's why speed to hire is super important.

Yeah, so we obviously get a ton of pushback on this, you know, from clients and companies in general. I think the founders think that moving fast means that you'll make mistakes. And that's really not what we're talking about here. You know, all the time companies tell us that they need to hire someone as of yesterday. But then when they get the candidates that they've actually dug into that they really want, they may take a week to do interviews. They don't, you know, provide feedback to us or their team. Maybe they go on vacation and they won't take the time to meet the right people. And then the startup ends up failing or, they do have those mishires. Where we see a huge impact is the opposite of that, where everyone gets into the meeting all at once. You know, anybody that's really touching hiring, and they can move through the process extremely quickly that way because everyone's absolutely on the same page. So it's about hiring the right people, but doing it quickly. And oftentimes what we see is when people even hire you know, meet the right person, they want to see more people. You know, everyone's like a little bit interested in like, oh, am I making the right decision? Are there more people out there? Which, you know, just prolongs the process. And there's a couple other things that are missing when you actually need to ask that question. We might have— you might have heard this before, but Jeff Bezos usually says that, you know, it's all about making a series of really good decisions. You know what you're doing and you stick to it.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, really important is finding the right one. So we've talked about aligning and finding your fit, need for speed, but finding the right one is really important as well. So in order to do this, we kind of tell you to look beyond a resume. Resume is not everything. Look beyond it. So don't feel the— don't feel the need to see more profiles or meet more candidates, because when you find the right one, you'll know, you'll have that intuition. Also consider candidates that don't fit all the criteria. Give them a chance to learn and grow. Those who are confident in themselves and their skills will be able to learn and really get things done. And those are the candidates that are going to make a huge impact. You know, let people talk about their story during an interview. This way you can get a full picture of their experience. And that's what looking beyond the resume really is. Candidates really don't need to check off all your boxes.

Yeah.

So this is where we see a lot of, you know, false starts and obviously missed opportunities in terms of bringing in the right candidates and obviously bringing in the right hires to move your business forward. There's a lot of opportunity cost in, you know, waiting and trying to figure out who the right one is. So, you know, a good example that we've seen over and over again is that, you know, we worked with a company that is now at the Series A stage. And when we first started with them, they didn't have a big brand or a name. We were tasked with finding them a tech leader, a CTO, and We, you know, by digging into what obviously our clients are looking for, really talking to them about what are the pros and cons of moving in different directions. We sent them one great candidate and literally right off the bat, they kind of said no. But knowing what we know and knowing what we know about digging into the business and speaking with them, we pushed that client to meet with that individual. Luckily, they had ended up trusting us and let us know afterwards that this person was perfect for the role on the team and ended up making an offer and hiring that individual. Looking back, you know, how successful that was and all these examples very similar to this that has happened when it's like not the person that you expected. I actually wrote a LinkedIn post about this. Like it's oftentimes not the person you expected would be a great fit. Years later, The candidate has grown with the company in that they're starting another business with this particular other founder as a, as a co-founder this time.

Yeah, really look beyond the resume. Hearing that person's story on paper, they may not have looked like what you would normally be looking for. Maybe they didn't check off those boxes that you would think, but after hearing their full story, they were a perfect fit. So, you know, one of the biggest things you will go into when hiring this first team is knowing what you're trying to solve. What are you trying to solve? When starting your search, be aware of the business problem this person will be solving, the person who you're going to hire. That's really important. As a founder, you'll have to be scrappy, but there is a fine line. So you got to know when to spend money on experts and when you can do it yourself. You can't do everything yourself and you can't spend all the money in the world. So knowing that fine line is really important. Try spending time in various roles within your organization. That way, when you go to hire, you will have a better idea of the challenges this person needs to solve. You should think about hiring people whose expertise will drive your business so that you, the founder, can get back to your tasks. So hiring experts so that you can get back to your job while also, you know, learning about the different jobs and the challenges of the role.

Yeah, so oftentimes we see companies try to throw everything into one person. You know, I need this person, like you see this on these like lengthy job descriptions and these requirements that a lot of companies set forth. You know, you know, I need this, this, and this. This person needs to have like all these things, right? And so that can be a really huge mistake, especially if you've got a limited budget, especially if you're a startup and people don't know who you are. Could, can be a very big mistake to try and solve all your problems with one person, although it would be, you know, nice and it would be great because you've obviously got limited budget and to have somebody do as many things as possible is great, but that's not the point of actually solving for their particular role. So if you think about a founder, I mean, you've gotta be a really great generalist. And then when you hire someone, you need them to be extremely pointy to solve some of the problems, to take that off your plate. So that you can deliver and execute what needs to be delivered on as a business. And oftentimes that actually holds people back. So you can absolutely, as I mentioned, like get somebody who's a Jack or Jill of all trades, you know, that, that fits into the, you know, startup realm and you're looking for the best person, but you want to make sure that they're dedicated to be silo in a particular area that you you want to solve currently today. So I'll give you an example, like maybe you're a founder and you can convert people from a demo. Once they're already in a demo, it's easy for you or easier than anyone else to convert them into a demo 'cause you're passionate, you know about the product, there's no uptime in terms of being able to do that. But you struggle at times with getting people into the door, maybe just don't have enough time. To do outbound sales and you need someone to engage customers, like build new relationships, create a deck. Maybe they know how to negotiate and onboard, you know, a particular client of yours. And so that's what you're gonna go hire for, someone who can do that, not do the demos, right? So try to take away those things to make sure you get that pointy person. Another example might be maybe you've posted a lot of ads on Instagram and they seem to be doing okay. But you don't have the time to kind of like analyze if they could be performing better, if you could get a better deal in terms of what you're spending. And you need someone who can specifically focus their entire day and their experience on creating beautiful ads, make sure that they're performing better day, week to week, month to month.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's really just about getting scrappy, but also knowing that fine line. So one of the best tricks of the trade that we will always tell you is being able to sell your opportunity to candidates. Know how to sell your company, your mission, and your vision and your culture in order to land that top high potential candidate. Explain well what your business is doing, the problem it is solving, and how it is making an impact. People love to make an impact, and those are the reasons why they're going to join your company. You always want to be selling yourself, your business, and the role to the candidate throughout the entire process. So it's not just the first, second, or in the last stage that you want to sell yourself. You want to show them how they will be an asset on the team and continually, continually is the point, continually display your strengths of communication and culture throughout the interview process. So don't just stop at one interview and selling yourself. Always be showing them a good candidate experience that will help you land that top high potential candidate.

Yeah, so this is really important. I mean, I don't think we know anyone that can't improve at this and can't improve at selling their business. When we work with founders, usually the first thing is that, you know, they assume that everyone is interested in their business because they're passionate about it. And, you know, the reality is that there's, if they're going after top performing talent, companies are going to be competing against that same talent. If you think they're good, someone else thinks they're good as well, right? So most companies are competing for the exact same things you offer: flexible work environment, good leadership, a chance to work in a cool revolutionary product. And when we do an intake or onboarding call with clients, they usually talk about all those things like, oh, we're solving this world mission and we've got this flex work environment, but they never go into any detail or why it's better than any where else, and they're really selling themselves short. And this is a huge area for improvement. You know, back in the day when candidates used to fight to get their foot in the door, right? Like they were lucky to have the opportunity in the first place. Like these things have changed and people that aren't looking at how fast hiring and hiring trends are changing are going to be left behind. You might not feel it today, or tomorrow, but you're gonna feel it for sure in your business through attrition in some way, shape, or form. Because candidates have more options. You know, often people say, well, all these layoffs, aren't there all these people that are available? You know, there's more jobs than there are people laid off. And there are really, really strong talent that have multiple offers even in this time. So, You know, as a company, no matter what stage, you're probably competing with, you know, other, other companies that have maybe a bigger brand name than you, potentially bigger budgets. And one thing you can control and bring to the table is how you sell yourself and your company and how you explain it very candidly, openly, transparently, and uniquely to drive the right people into your business.

Absolutely. Super important. Always be selling. Always be closing. All right. This is, this is a really interesting one that we definitely thought we should share with you. And that's regarding asking relevant interview questions. So you want to focus on questions regarding the day-to-day of the position. Don't try to trick candidates with questions that have no meaning. You really want to work on removing the friction and actually making it easy on the candidate. I'm, I'm being very serious. So, you know, look for questions around problem solving to see how the candidate can work under pressure, ask the right questions, and figure things out autonomously. Those are going to really help you find that right person. And always, always be prepared to answer questions as well, because candidates are going to come in with a ton.

Yeah, so this is one of those things where, you know, it's, it's an ongoing process for us to get companies to ask the right questions so that, you know, by the time they make an offer, and by the time the candidate accepts, it's going to be the right fit for the longest term possible, right. So this is super important to get to know the person in front of you and, and, you know, not and focus on the right thing. So it was, it was trendy to kind of ask and trick candidates into, you know, questions like how many golf balls fit into a bus. And, you know, they're, they're happy that it's as hard as Harvard to get into this company and work for this company. Like, we've seen a lot of people like laugh about that, you know, how, how difficult it is. One, that's, you know, not, not inclusive as a start. And, you know, it's, it's more We found that it doesn't work. I mean, Google has admitted that, you know, people got hired and they did really well for other reasons, not those trick questions. So I'll give you like a real-time example of a company that is pre-Series A, and they are a small startup that decided— they're about 40, 50 people— started to decide to run mock demos for their sales hires. They ended up hiring even the people that might not have done as well in the demo. And in the end, the reality is that they kind of discovered that the people who actually did worse during the demo compared to the people that did better actually performed higher in the job. So like, what was the point, right? This isn't to say, you know, hey, don't show candidates what it would be like, you know, if I worked here. Give them a good idea and like, you know, potentially do mock interviews. But if Candidates do have that, you know, trust, attitude, and passion, but maybe they don't show you that they're, you know, the top within the candidates that you're looking at in terms of how they did on that demo doesn't necessarily mean that they're not going to far exceed the candidate that just happened to do better in that demo or look better on paper or whatever it was, right? So the other thing we like to talk about is like, You're not Google. Like most people come to us and say, hey, like we'd really like to hire somebody from, you know, Amazon or Facebook or, you know, Pinterest or one of those companies, right? And it's like those candidates probably aren't a good fit for you because they're not at your stage. They're not at your startup. It's not to say that they're definitely not a good fit. I mean, there are candidates that, that could be a really good fit and understand what it's like working in a startup environment or in your environment, period. But You're kind of going after, you know, the wrong— so like, why would you imitate their interview process? And Google's already said that the length of the interview process should be 4 interviews. So like, you know, why is yours longer? Basically, what you want to do is ask questions that are gonna be relevant to the job, that are going to help you and the candidate understand why there's a good fit, equally you and the candidate understand that when they start the job, they're going to be able to excel in it.

Absolutely. Really removing that friction, making it easy for the candidate while also, you know, getting questions around problem solving, as we mentioned, is super important. One of the most important things you're going to do when hiring your first team and one of the most important things you have to really focus on is prioritizing company culture. You want to make sure the candidate is going to add to your company culture, especially in this size of a stage or pre-seed or a small companies, it's super important. So maybe near the end of the process, we suggest having them meet other team members casually, either through a quick coffee-style chat or even something fun like a lunch or a team-building sort of event. Just because, you know, these are going to be people you're going to be working with every single day. To an extent, culture fit may be considered more important than experience fit, especially in early-stage companies. And I can't reiterate that enough. It's really important because These are going to be the people who, you know, you're going to work with and everything else can possibly be taught, right? Culture is about the alignment of attitudes and vision. You drive the culture you want to create and the people you want to attract.

Yeah. So this is super, super important. I mean, what I see oftentimes is like companies, you know, really trying to make sure they get it right now. But the reality is that culture is ever-changing. What your company does now might not be what you do forever. You might find product-market fit in a different area, might go after a different set of customers, right? So if you're thinking too far ahead at your current stage, you're just not going to hire the right people you need to know, need now. And you don't necessarily need somebody who's going to last for 10 years. I mean, hey, that would be a great outcome. Of everything that happens from here over the next few years and everything continues to be aligned, but it actually may be the wrong person that you need today. And another example of a company that really got hurt in terms of how they were able to scale and grow is a company that's culture rapidly changed after they hit 50 people. The culture that they had from 1 to 50 was completely different. Everyone kind of knew their name and just like really, really struggled. So there are definitely some great resources out there to help you build the right culture as you grow. But think clearly about what you need today.

Yeah, I can't reiterate enough how important the culture fit is almost over experience fit. So make sure that you're having them meet people, that you're meeting them, and that you're really putting that as a priority. As you hire your first team. One more thing that we quite often see and wanted to talk about was really setting realistic expectations for the candidates while you're meeting them and about your role. So you want to share both the positive and the negative aspects of the position with the candidates. This is really all about leading with transparency. So this is about culture. This is about, you know, finding the right fit. This has to do in, you know, every aspect of hiring. So maybe share previous pitfalls, mistakes, or hiccups that you have seen someone make in the role that can help determine if this person is going to be a good fit, or at least it gives them insight into where they might need expertise or a little bit of extra, you know, work. Talk about the leadership, work environment, and the pain points they may experience. And this way, when they come in, they actually know what they're going to be dealing with. With, right? And I think it's super important and definitely something that you need to think about when hiring your first team.

Yeah. So this is something that companies like don't get good at and it really hurts them long-term or, you know, during turnover and when, you know, hires can be extremely costly. This is when you experience it right away. Transparency is really like the best tool in your tool belt. You kind of like, we talk about obviously repelling candidates as much as we sell them on your opportunity. Look, all companies have some sort of negative aspect. And if you don't know what your negative aspect is, definitely, you know, do the work to figure that out. Talk about, talk to exit interviews, stay interviews. You should really be be honest during your interview process and talk about the pain points. One of the biggest complaints that we get on the candidate side is like, this job wasn't the way that it was explained to me, um, you know, from the founder. And like, that's why they're looking to leave. And that's why it's easy for us to, you know, introduce that candidate to one of our clients because the company that they're currently working for, um, you know, that didn't set realistic expectations, wasn't transparent in the interview process, is not actually what they were looking for. So, You might sort of like, you know, talk to someone who might have left and you didn't think they were successful. You should go over that, like know all the good, the bad, and the ugly. As a— so here's an example, like a good example that we've seen a bunch of times is that, you know, if you're a founder and you have time constraints, which I'll make a bet that you absolutely do. And so, this particular client of ours, they were hiring a head of sales. And they told us we only have, you know, 1 hour a week to be with that person and to spend with that person. So that has to be expressed to the candidate in terms of what the onboarding is like, what the, you know, succession planning is like, what the training is going to be like. And we needed someone who was super confident in their ability in the role. And they're great at time management and, you know, self-managed, um, somebody who could make their own decisions. So just, you know, be sure just not to sugarcoat or sweep things under the rug just because the person, um, in front of you, like, you really want them, right? Um, because that person will likely end up leaving if it's not as they expected. Um, so that, that's super important.

Yeah, I mean, it is really important. And honestly, finding your fit is really that person who's going to be excited about the role after you share what you think are negative. Maybe they really like to be autonomous. And so what you think might be a negative aspect of the position might actually really excite this person. So sharing it isn't always meaning that you're going to lose that person, but it's really about finding that right fit, finding alignment and setting, you know, realistic expectations. And that's how you're going to find that perfect person. Okay, so Now we have time for questions and we also have our QR code over here. So if you want to connect with us on LinkedIn or book a time with Adam or, you know, check out Hired Hippo, which is, I think, a really great platform for anyone looking to hire, you know, sales and customer-focused positions. And yeah.

Awesome. Thanks, Abbie. Thanks, Adam. Folks, if you've enjoyed this chat or their topic, there's emojis. You can show some love. I think you can press 2, you can press 3.

Okay, okay.

So we've got some positive feedback. That's good. We're still live with about 192 people, so that's great. We're going to flip over now to Q&A. Awesome. Lots of love for the two of you. Awesome. Let's just go into speaker view and—

Thank you.

All right, I'm gonna just— we've got a lot of questions coming into the, through the Q&A, but let's kind of get things started. I really like this question, which is, folks can read it, but like everything's like, how should I be thinking about equity as an early stage founder? Like, should I be giving a lot to it? I know what the founding team, you typically can. But yeah, Abby or Adam, whoever wants to take this.

Yeah, it's a really solid question. Abby, you can jump in anytime. But we get asked this a lot. Like, I mean, I would say it depends, which is like a lot of times my default answer because, you know, it is very specific. But look, when a candidate decides to join you or you make a new hire, it's, it's, you know, more risky for them than it is for you. Like oftentimes as a founder, we kind of think, oh, this is risky for me. I'm paying all this money to this person. You know, it's going to be risky if it doesn't work out. Whatever are my investors going to think if I have turnover in this role? It's way more risky for the candidate to jump in and be a part of your business. And I think people don't just don't think about that, that enough, like they're either like coming over to you from another company, maybe they have family, maybe there's oftentimes things that are going on. And so like equity in a startup is like really the one thing that you can offer them with a lower budget. So if you can't offer them equity, you've got to offer them something else. If you don't want to give up that equity, you've made that decision that you're at that stage, like I can't remember the person who the name of the person who asked the question, but then you gotta up it with other things, right? So yeah, that's a really good point.

Honestly, I was gonna say that oftentimes we actually see the opposite where they don't have as much budget for salary and so they compensate with equity. So the opposite way is it is harder. I mean, I would rethink that because you want people who are invested in your business and to show that they're invested. They wanna sort of feel like they're an owner, right? They're gonna take this risk like Adam was saying. So, you know, you don't have to, but you will probably have to compensate in other ways if it's not, you know, either salary or equity.

Those are great responses. I don't think there's anything additional I can add. Let's just keep burning through these questions. I think we can do about 5, 6 until we wrap up. So, I'm just gonna keep queuing them up. This I find really, really fun. How much should I spend on my first hire?

Oh, get asked this question all the time. That's a great question. Really, really great question. Sorry, can you just pull that back up again? What percentage? I didn't catch the second part of it. What percentage of MRR?

Yeah, what percentage of MRR? Let me just bring this back up.

Yeah, so I mean, just in terms of like runway and how you're thinking about, um, the number of months, I mean, ramp up time for people is usually 6 months. I mean, it depends on the type of role, but somebody is not gonna operate in, you know, high efficiency in 6 months. Um, obviously companies want, um, people to operate like them as the founder the next day, right? Um, and, you know, great people can lower that, that, that 6-month ramp-up time for sure. But, um, you, you want to take into account at least 3, maybe 6 months of, of ramp time. Um, you know, I talk about this a lot with like salespeople especially. Um, you know, they have to, you know, even if they know the product, they have to like learn your customers. They have to, you know, they're bringing in their, their own Rolodex. Those people like already maybe have like other commitments. So there is that, that ramp-up time. So, um, but maybe for a developer, they could ramp up much shorter because they're just jumping in, doing the code. Uh, but really, the answer to this question is how good are you at onboarding, um, your, your current team. That's going to play a huge, huge factor in terms of how quickly that they can ramp up. And, you know, did you ask the right questions? Were you very transparent up front? Um, you know, that's gonna be, that's gonna be super, you know, important with this aspect. But, you know, yeah, at least 3 months of their salary if it's a revenue generating role and you're looking at how much, 'cause the question was around MRR, how much they can bring in. The other thing I just wanna add quickly is that oftentimes when companies are hiring like their first salesperson or, you know, potentially a BDR to come work with them, let's say as an example, quick Example, like, just easy is like, let's say you pay them $60,000 plus commission. So it's $30 an hour essentially that they'd be working. Even if they, uh, you know, get objections, objection handling from certain clients, they open up doors, they told somebody about your business that hadn't known about you yesterday, there is still a $30 value add to that. So you don't wanna just think about like, you know, uh, the end goal. You wanna think about like moving up to the end goal and you know, how much value that can bring to your business from a salary perspective. You know, if I get a developer to do this, this, and this and solve for, you know, not having any bugs, how much is that worth to my business, right? So awesome.

Abby, anything to add or do you want to move on?

No, that was perfect.

Awesome. I think Abby brought this up, but I'm going to bring it up again because I think folks missed it, but it's like, you know, what are some important questions you should ask to employees during a job interview process? Uh, let me add one spin here, whether, you know, let's say if you're doing this with something that's high equity and a like low, um, low salary, and then one with like high salary, low equity. Like, let's look at both perspectives. If I'm interviewing someone for a role, how, like, what type of questions should I be asking?

I don't know if that changes your answer, but I mean, the equity portion versus salary wouldn't matter in terms of what questions you're asking that person. But like Adam talked about and sort of some of the things that we mentioned is, you know, what are you passionate about? Like, what do you want to do? What is the impact that you want to make? Those are really important questions to ask when, you know, what are you looking to do next? What is your goal? What are your goals, you know, this coming year, right now? Why are you here in this interview? I know it's kind of vague, but, you know, obviously I'm not going to go into specific questions around, you know, how to hire a salesperson or a dev person because there's just so many roles out there and each role requires something different. But the best things that you can ask are around passion, interests, impact. Those are the questions that, you know, you can ask any, any person that's coming to your interview to make sure that they are a good fit. And I hope that kind of helps. And Adam can elaborate.

Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, everything that you don't see on like a resume or LinkedIn, what they can do, what does success look like for them, how will you know that this is the right job for you, like those type of questions. I mean, really, we like to tell our clients to treat these interviews like a podcast. You want to learn so much about this individual person, ask them questions like you're extracting a book out of them so that you are super confident, they are equally as confident. Joining the company as you are in hiring them, right? And, you know, candidates really make changes for 3 main reasons. So obviously, we're dealing with people, so it's all a little bit more complicated than this, but essentially 3 reasons. Is it the right work environment for me to be in next? Is it the right job that I want to be doing? And is it the right compensation? So right off the bat, I mean, you need to get aligned on those 3 things. You know, if you expect a person to be in the office 3 days a week, like where are they coming from? How would they get there? You know, that kind of thing. I mean, you just wanna be really like straightforward about that. If it's the job, like, and you need someone to, you know, help reduce your budget in terms of ad spend and get better results, like how would they think about going about doing that? But don't try to trick them into answering that question. Like actually give them some like hard data and don't expect them to go from like, you know, $100,000 in inbound and when you have zero, right? So there has to be like, there's obviously some nuances to this and it depends, but those are some of the questions that you want to ask without giving away our secret sauce.

Yeah, I definitely call them probing questions. So you start off with something generic, tell me about when you did X, right? And then from there you go into these probing questions. How did you do that? What budget spend did you have? How long did it take? What were your results? And honestly, when you're thinking about interviewing, actually thinking more about listening as opposed to asking is a great tip because people will share things when you just listen that you would never expect and that you will really find out good things about them or interesting things that could be very helpful.

100%. Those are great responses. Let's keep going. This I find very, very, I find a lot of these questions interesting, but like local versus, I guess in-person versus remote. I think if I asked you this question 3 years ago, Adam, you'd be like, yeah, 100%. But I'd be curious, what are you guys seeing at Linkus or at HH? Like, are we seeing the appetite for back to like in-person again? Are we fully remote? Like, I'd love to get you.

Yeah, I mean like I kind of, and Abhi, I'll try to be quick. So you can jump in here, but like, I wish people would just like kind of put this question to bed. It's a great question. It's a great question. I don't mean it that way, but it's like, what's the type of company that you wanna build, right? Obviously you need to be well aligned to the candidates, whether they want remote or in office, but like some companies operate better in office and some operate better remote. Like it just depends on how you're built. And some people can't even work remotely. I mean, if you're a coffee shop, you can't work remote, right? So it just depends on what you are doing As a company, I mean, my recommendation is always if you can be remote and you can make that highly productive, frickin' do it. I mean, you're gonna have just that much of a talent pool to choose from. We always say like if you can offer $1 million in salary, you're gonna have, you know, anyone who's gonna be interested in at least chatting with you, right? The same thing with remote. I mean, you just open it up that much more to more people that you can engage with. And find that right individual. We found as a company that we were like 10 times more productive remotely, right? But it depends on the company and we tested both out and we continue to test both out.

But yeah, it's really depending. I mean, you, I can't give a right or wrong answer here. I mean, look, like Adam said, if you are remote, you will open your pool to, I mean, who knows, you can worldly if you can, right? Not necessarily, but you could, right? You can hire pretty much anywhere. It also might be a personality thing. Let's say it's coming from the candidate side. Like for me, I like a little bit of both, but I definitely work better remotely because I'm very distracted. I can get distracted by people and by things, by movement. So I really focus when I'm alone and I have no one in my house to talk to except for my cat. But it's really, yeah. So I mean, I hope that helps. But if you are local and you have that, you have great people in your city. I'm sure everywhere there's a lot of talent out there. If you can just look beyond what you originally looked for, you can definitely find people who want to come into office and who are your peers and who are local.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, there's a lot of our clients like want to move remote in office, sorry, at least 2 or 3 times a week. And like we can find talent that wants to go in office. I mean, there are people that love going to office. And you need to think about where they are in their lives. If they've got like kids that are very young, people are probably likely going to want to stay home. Just like a, you know, example. Or if you have people with like teenagers, they'll probably want to get out of the house. Right. So it's just in how close they are to the office. When we started Hired Hippo, actually, the number one thing that drove candidates was location. If they got a job that was even 5 minutes closer to the house or one that they could walk instead of take the transit, they would choose that over money, over anything else. So, you know, if people want to be remote, like, those people are gonna want to be remote, like, don't change their mind and don't hire them if you're not remote and they want remote.

Yeah.

Awesome. Those are great responses. I think let's do the last question here, then wrap up and then go over to networking. Up. So Dmitry's saying that, you know, he's a technical individual, he's looking for other people in the business, but like, how does he hire for something that he has very little understanding for? Like, but like, the inverse is equally applicable. If I'm a founder and I'm trying to hire a CTO, I very have very little technical knowledge. So like, what's the best way to approach that in your opinion?

Great question. Adam, go ahead.

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. We run into this a lot, a lot, a lot. There's like companies that just focus on finding other co-founders to— but this, this comes back to like one of our slides, just to find somebody pointy that's not like you, that's not like you, right? So how you would go about it, I mean, that's, that's super hard. You need to be having a lot of conversations. But how do you know if somebody is great that's right in front of you and you don't know anything about that aspect? Like if you're non-technical and you're hiring a technical person, you need to bring in somebody that is good Technically, yeah. So, you know, go to Founders Institute, say, hey, is there anyone that would like, you know, be willing to sit on my interviews, paid, unpaid, whatever you're able to do, and get them to sit on and give you their advice on what they think about this person and get some trusted people or advisors. Because if you can't make those decisions, then you need someone else to help you make the decision on other things other than, you know, gut and fit. And stuff like that, right?

Yeah, this is such a great question. And I did— we did kind of go over some of these things in slides. And this is— I think this comes down to also, you know, looking beyond the resume, right, in order to find your fit. So I think it would be, you know, if you're technical and you're looking for something in marketing, you know, or if you're a co-founder, like we mentioned to you to sit in certain positions for a little bit just to sort of test them out, it will really help when you're hiring that person. You kind of know a little bit about it. If you don't know anything about it, that's okay too. Ask questions, interview people, talk to people. That will really help you figure out what you're looking for. You don't have to test someone technically or know that they're the best technical person in the entire world to get the job. What you are looking for, probably in a, in, in, I would say in an early stage startup, is someone who is passionate, someone who wants the position, and someone who's going to learn whatever they're lacking to figure it out and work autonomously. Those are important and that you can always ask about and that you can always figure out. So you don't have to ask them, you know, marketing questions specific. You don't have to ask them technical questions specifically, but you can ask around passion and all of those sort of generic things that we talked about during our, during our presentation to find out if they're a good fit. And I, I couldn't stress that enough because, you know, again, you can still have someone technical come in and help test them. And still, it might not be the right person if they're not passionate or, you know, looking to make an impact in your role. You know, that's sort of my two cents on finding the good fit on stuff that you're not that knowledgeable about. I mean, I think when I started here at Linkus, I like, you know, I used to be a professional dancer. I knew nothing about tech, but I learned everything, right? So You don't need to know everything. And when I ask a lot of questions to my candidates, I don't know how to do data science, but I know when they're good because they love to talk about it and they can go into detail and they can express their, their interest and, and, you know, among other things. And that's what I look for. And that's what I say makes a really good candidate, not testing them on data science, which I personally know nothing about. Right. I hope that helps and that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to end things, folks. Like very, very well sound advice on like how to find a great technical or non-technical co-founder. You know, follow the stuff that Adam and Abby said in their presentation. Like it's very, very interesting to look at your, or review your deck in hindsight after like 6, 7 years of like startup experience, Adam. Like, I'm like, damn, I wish I had met Adam 7 years ago and he told me this. There's a lot of, and Abby as well, it's a lot of sound advice. So I'm really glad that you folks came out. We'll wrap things off here, everyone. We'll end the session now. Stick around, there'll be some networking tables. You folks can network with each other. I don't know if Adam and Abby have a chance, but I'll be around in some of the networking tables if you have any questions about F5, about recruiting, I'm happy to answer them. But in the meantime, some people are asking about recording. We will send out an email with everyone's LinkedIn and recording of this, and you should have access to all the assets within 48 hours. With that being said, Adam and Abby, thank you so much. Crowd, show some love. Use the emojis.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for attending. We really love it. We love hearing your questions. They were amazing questions. You know, I think they were really relevant and we hope that we can make a small impact on your business and that we help. And definitely let us know if, you know, if we've helped when you're hiring that person and send us a message on LinkedIn and let us know because we love to follow this up, you know, with all of you.

Thanks so much. You guys getting a lot of love and emojis. But all right, thanks everyone. We'll see you in the networking table.

All right, perfect. See you there. Come visit us.

Thanks.