Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
Curious how others find early stage startups to join. Thinking first engineer that a startup is hiring to maybe first 20 employees.
Curious how others find early stage startups to join. Thinking first engineer that a startup is hiring to maybe first 20 employees.
I think the most relevant is through your network, mainly because it’s generally a trust matter on both ends. It’s best when the deal is a known quantity vs looking over “who’s hiring monthly HN posts”.
I had 10-15 people i was working with (not all employed) at my last startup and they all came through my network either directly (ex colleagues) or through trusted parties.
Again it’s mostly a trust thing more than anything.
I think a good strategy is to get close to the kind of startups you care about without (before) direct intent to join. It’s easy to hang out (or at least it used to be) through various events, meetups or co-working places.
Many startups I didn’t join and could have been good, I’ve met through open-source (Hadoop, HBase, Mesos, etc.) these are companies like Cloudera, DataBricks etc. when they were tiny. I still miss that crowd, years later.
So it’s mostly a matter of being close to what’s happening, able to filter and ready to jump when opportunity arises.
Y Combinator and other accelerators have job boards: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
A lot of VCs also have job boards, or they will list their portfolio companies and you can reach out directly:
https://jobs.a16z.com/jobs
https://jobs.sequoiacap.com/jobs
https://kindredventures.com/portfolio
etc
Adding to this, the YC jobs portal is also on: https://www.workatastartup.com/
There are also plenty of early stage startup job offers on the Ask HN: Who is hiring threads (here’s the latest one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757794)
The above can be hard to navigate, but there are some recommended tools in there that scrape the listings and make them searchable
Lastly, you can also try this CLI tool that uses AI to match your resume and preferences to job listings scraped from HN and a couple of other sources: https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs
Oh, and you can also attend startup meetups, a lot of times you can meet the founders in person and they might be looking to hire (that’s how I first got into an early YC company)
Just do the stuff in the same space, either by aligning your current work or shipping hobby projects, writings, opinions on social media. You will quickly “map” the people in the area you are interested in and your only task is getting on their radar. Then you can expect them to reach out. This solves all the tediousness of cold outreach or interviews, etc. Worked well for me for the last two decades.
1. Twitter: Founders and employees of early stage startups are often on twitter.
2. Portfolios of great angel investors and VC firms.
3. Emailing people you admire, eg investors, founders, or engineers.
4. Write down your friends and past and current colleagues who you think are a) most likely to be successful and b) you’d most enjoy working with. Or even just who you most like, trust, and admire. Then see where they work. And ask them about other companies they know. The simplest version of this is go on LinkedIn, and browse your network, and click to check out the companies all of your past classmates and colleagues work at.
5. Go to events that would have interesting technologists in your field (ie the areas where you have skill and taste, so you can pick who you admire), and ask them where they work, and which startups they’ve been impressed by. Talks, conferences, meetups, maker spaces.
6. Biased self-promotion: I’m kind of obsessed with interesting startups and sometimes share lists of startups, eg https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957834156794343730 and https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957446016950816866
7. HN who is hiring thread: there are lots of interesting ones there, you’ll just want to dig through to find them.
8. Look up university career fair company lists to see which companies are hiring, if they’re hiring new grads and interns then they’re very likely hiring senior engineers too.
9. Podcasts: some technologists have great podcasts, so do some investors and VC firms.
10. Search for startups founded by alumni from your school, you’re more likely to have alumni second degree connections there.
I’ll note that investors get many bets, employees get one at a time. So you need a higher bar. Meeting in person is particularly high signal.
My tip for filtering companies is to spend as much time as possible in person with the team before accepting an offer, ideally at least on 3+ separate occasions, with 3+ separate people. If there’s doubt, skip. This is also why it’s so good to start by identifying your most impressive friends and colleagues and see where they work, because you start with that high trust filter.
I'm curious as to why startup would be a goal specifically vs the job itself at any company? Lifestyle, company size, career growth, equity, something else?
You have a lot more control in an early stage startup vs a later stage one where lots of design decisions have already been made before you arrived and you're kind of stuck with them. If you like having an influence on the design of the product, tools, even implementation languages the earlier you get in, the more influence you have.
Watch funding announcements and reach out directly, preferably with a warm intro if you can get one. Recently funded startups are often under pressure to hire ASAP and if you convince them to hire you, they’ll do anything to close the deal (i.e. they’d rather beat a high counter-offer than restart their interviewing cycle).
For startups that have an open-source component, GitHub is a good channel. That's how our first hires came to marimo.
Look for startups that interest you and then email the founders. Follow up every two months until you hear a hard no. Things are absolute chaos at an early startup and it's rare that the job board (if even there at all) is up to date.
Source: I work at an early stage startup.
This should be the top comment. Nailed it.
In the four early stage startups I've gotten into: 1) Found it through an agency (this was in the late 80s, though). 2,4) I knew someone who was already working there. 3) I knew someone who knew someone who worked there.
So basically through your network.
I joined 3 seed->Series A startups where I didn't know one of the cofounders. I would never recommend it. Only join early startups if you have worked with at least one of the cofounders before.
Wellfound.com