Curious how others find early stage startups to join. Thinking first engineer that a startup is hiring to maybe first 20 employees.
Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
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Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#2I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#3Look 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#4Y 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.sequoiacap.com/jobs
https://kindredventures.com/portfolio
etc
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#5I'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?
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#6I'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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#7In 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#8Just 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#9Y 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)
Re: Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join
#10For startups that have an open-source component, GitHub is a good channel. That's how our first hires came to marimo.