There's No Magic Trick
The first thing most founders underestimate is the sheer amount of time and effort it takes to find the right people to join your cause. Early hiring is some of the highest-leverage time you'll spend, but it takes real work.
When done well, the hiring pipeline you build today will help you fill 40 roles over the next two years. So don't think of this as just filling the role in front of you. Think of it as an ongoing investment into the business in the same way you invest in pipeline and strategic partnerships for go-to-market.
Founders who have succeeded at this treat it as a weekly discipline, not a one-off project. Some data points:
- "I had forgotten how hard it was to hire people in the very beginning. I think that Michelle [Zatlyn] and I spent probably at least 70% of our time in the first two years just begging people to work for us." — Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO, Cloudflare, speaking to TechCrunch in 2019 ↗.
- "Your goal should be to speak with at least 10 candidates a week." — David Paffenholz, co-founder & CEO, Juicebox, in The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs ↗ (19:45).
- "In the first 6 months of starting the company, I probably spent 20 hours per week on finding people to come work with us." — a prominent AI founder/CEO, in a Category Ventures founder interview.
- "I personally send at least 40 outbound messages a week." — Memfault co-founder, in a Category Ventures founder interview.
Takeaway: block recurring time on your calendar for this every single week, not just when you have a role to fill.
Why Network Hiring Works
Surrounding yourself with the right team early on can make or break your startup. No matter who you hire, there is always some risk that it won't pan out. The whole point of a hiring process is to reduce that risk and gain trust that this person will actually be able to do the work.
Separately, the more you know a candidate, the better you and your team can sell the company. The candidate will also have a much better sense of what they're stepping into when they join and be able to self-assess if this role is a good fit for them.
Hiring someone from your existing network, ideally someone who has already worked in the trenches with you, is one of the best ways to reduce the risks of hiring. However, it's not always possible to find people that you've had such an intimate working relationship with. Read on for more ideas to expand your pool of in-network candidates.
Where to Actually Find People
In rough order of where to find the highest trust / lowest risk candidates:
Tier 1: Direct Experience
- People you've directly worked with. This one is obvious. Who are the people who you've done something hard with and would do so again? Start with the first names that come to mind and grab a coffee with all of them. Pro tip: it often lands well to ask great people if they know anyone for a role and give them space to raise their own hand if they're interested.
- Your team's network. If you haven't already, ask your co-founders and team which of their ex-coworkers they would want on the team with no reservations. Every member of your team should be thinking about their top smartest friends. Reach out to them. If your team is big enough, arm them with referral bonuses: $10k minimum; many companies do $25k+.
Tier 2: Targeted Network Expansion
- Second-degree network. You should be asking every advisor, investor, and colleague: "Who are the 5 smartest people you've worked with in the last two years, even if they're happy where they are?" This is regardless of role. Keep a list of these folks and systematically keep in touch. They might not be looking today but one day they will be. As you meet more people ask them this same referral question; it compounds.
- Your sleeper network. There are definitely people you know who might be great but didn't come to mind initially. Utilize tools like Happenstance ↗ to do a targeted search of your network. Prioritize the folks you know best. However, even if it's a looser LinkedIn connection, vet this person with other mutuals and then get the good ones in your hiring process. Make sure your whole team is exposing their networks in Happenstance to extend your reach.
- Impressive people you meet. As a founder you're meeting new people every day. Some of them are amazing. Casually tell good people wherever you find them that you'd love to work with them someday. This lands much better planting the seed before you need them. But be tactful; sometimes it can be awkward to poach someone from a customer.
Tier 3: Specialized Communities and Social
- Open source communities. Follow niche Discords and GitHub issues on tools you actually use, and find the folks responsible for code you've read and respected. Ideally you're looking in communities you were genuinely a part of before you had a company to pitch. If you reach out cold, be specific: "I've seen your work on ____, here's what we're building, want to grab 30 minutes." Juicebox's ↗ open text search can be a great tool for coming up with a list of people to target once your imagination runs out.
- Twitter/X or other social media. DM people whose technical writing you've followed and engaged with genuinely for months. This should not be people you're discovering the day you decide to hire.
- Cold LinkedIn outbound. Use regular LinkedIn (note in connection request) or upgrade to LinkedIn Sales Navigator ↗ and reach out to people who have the skills you're looking for. More on this below.
Founder Outbound
You don't always have a warm intro to everyone. That's where founder-driven outbound comes in. This might end up being your highest volume channel when you need to hire someone today and the long-horizon tactics to curate pre-vetted candidates haven't yet yielded the right people.
But don't despair! Founder outreach converts surprisingly well (founders we've interviewed see roughly a 20% response rate). Here are a few tips to doing this well:
- All outreach should be coming from the founder themselves and the more personalized the better. People do actually respond to outreach if they think there's a human behind it. It's possible to have another person ghostwriting under the founder's account, but it still needs to be personalized and done well. Default to doing this yourself.
- Get creative on venue: Twitter DMs, Discord, GitHub. Pick wherever it feels natural for the type of candidate, not just LinkedIn or email.
- All founders should be doing outbound, not just the CEO.
Increasing Your Recruiting Surface Area
While it's helpful to mine your existing network, you should also be actively looking to expand the surface area of your network so you have at-bats with the best candidates when the time is right. Do this by being public in the communities that matter to your ideal hires (or customers when it comes to sales!). What that means:
- Write in public. Most importantly, write what feels genuine to you. This could be technical posts about decisions you made and why, or problems you ran into. This is to lay out for others how you think, not targeted for PR. The right engineer reads three of your posts and thinks "I want to work on that." Think about how you position your writing and how it might draw in future hires.
- Go where the specific skill congregates. This could be research lab alumni groups, conference hallway tracks (e.g. ICML/NeurIPS), Discord/Slack communities built around a specific architecture or tool, or university lab mailing lists. Stay away from generic job boards. Narrow channels get you people already self-selected for depth in exactly what you need.
- Play the long game with people who aren't looking. You might meet some of your best hires 6-12 months before they join. Don't pitch a job the first time. Stay in their orbit, send them relevant content, grab a coffee when you're near their office. You can sometimes orchestrate coincidental run-ins (Greg Brockman on early Stripe hiring, First Round archive clip via Brett Berson, 5:55 ↗), but be tactful and genuine. When their situation shifts (bad manager, layoffs, boredom), you're already top of mind.
Being active in someone's community allows a candidate to pre-vet themselves on you and your actual problem space before actually considering working for you.
Daily/Weekly Habits
- Always be on the lookout for good people, whether or not you have an open role for them right now.
- Be disciplined about reaching out every single week. You can reserve a block of time on a single day or spread it out, just make sure it happens.
- If you meet someone who is great, tell them you like them. Say it casually but directly (Greg Brockman on early Stripe hiring, First Round archive clip via Brett Berson, 7:05 ↗).
- Keep in touch with good people even when they're not looking. One day they will be.
- Ask your friends and community to keep an eye out too.
- Make your employees evangelists and let the outreach be genuinely theirs. Give them autonomy to adapt the hiring process where it makes sense (for how Cursor runs this, see Inside Cursor ↗ by Brie Wolfson, Colossus Review, November 2025).
- When a candidate visits the office, make sure everyone knows and comes to say hi.
- Use your investors to help close candidates. They can add credibility and hype up the long term vision of where this company could go.
Remember, Recruiting Is Sales
Something founders often miss in the recruiting process is that you need to sell a candidate on working for your company before you start vetting their skills. An easy way to do this is to find out what type of companies a candidate is looking to work for (big company, growth stage, or early stage) and then adapt your pitch based on your strengths (David Paffenholz walks through this in The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs ↗, 1:56).
Your pitch should also be tailored to the role. Closing a candidate looks different for a sales role vs. an engineering role. As an example, a sales hire might be more excited to hear how much business you've already closed through founder-led sales without even having a sales background, especially if they're on a commission. Alternatively, an engineering hire might be more interested in the impressiveness of your team's background and what they'll be able to learn (same talk, 21:16 ↗).
Don't Outsource Trust-Building
- The value of a strong personal network compounds over years. Handing that off to a third party cheapens your brand and the trust you're trying to build.
- Most agencies will waste your time, especially early on. Cost aside, agencies commonly don't understand your business and culture enough to send you good candidates. Reviewing their candidate submissions and managing the agency itself won't be worth the effort.
- Contract-to-hire can be a great tool for validating if someone is good, but it should never replace the effort you put into long term relationship-building with good people. If you've already worked with someone and know them well, you probably don't need a work trial.