Video · 35 min

The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs

Y Combinator · Y Combinator (YouTube) Free Beginner

The Startup Playbook for Hiring Your First Engineers and AEs

A talk on making those first critical hires, with the repeated point that early hiring is mostly selling, not filtering. Watching it helps a founder who has only ever bought agency hours understand what it takes to attract a permanent builder. It pairs well with the written YC library pieces above.

  • First engineer hiring is founder led selling, not delegated recruiting
  • You are recruiting a co builder, so bar and pitch both have to be high
  • Referrals and direct outreach outperform passive job posts early on
Watch on YouTube ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. When should I stop using an agency and hire my first in-house developer?
  2. How do I hire a developer without a warm network or startup connections?

Read with it

  1. Battle-tested YC advice on landing your critical first engineering hire, from founders who've done it at scale. It reframes... YC Startup Library Article · Essay How to hire your first engineer (YC Startup Library) Y Combinator (Greg Brockman, Harj Taggar)
  2. Once no-code has carried you to traction, this is a grounded guide to building the early team you eventually need, including... Lenny's Newsletter Article Hiring your early team Lenny Rachitsky
  3. A deep, practitioner heavy set of guides from operators who built strong technical teams from scratch, useful once you commit... First Round Review Article · long read Hiring engineers First Round Review
  4. Finding a great engineer is only half the battle when everyone is competing for them, and this piece is about the other half:... Y Combinator Startup Library Article · Medium read Convincing engineers to join your team Y Combinator
  5. The companion conversation, focused on how Zerodha actually built its engineering team in the Indian market, from first hires... Software Misadventures Podcast · 1 hr 15 min Kailash Nadh on Building the Tech Team at Zerodha Software Misadventures
  6. A high-signal, battle-tested framework for evaluating engineering talent from a leader who's done it hundreds of times.... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups Marco Rogers
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