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This will be a Software Engineer, beeing a dev myself i've started to explore my network without much luck. How do you find talented people?
Plenty of smart people out there, and plenty of talented people. Sometimes those go together. You should put together a description of the product or service, specifically, and describe the person you think would contribute to your goals. Remember that frameworks and languages don't describe skills or talents -- they describe tools. Then you advertise and try to find someone you can work with and take a chance, like every other employer looking for people.
Since you wrote "employee" and not "cofounder" I assume you have a paying job available.
Lots of people looking for work right now who got through vetting at companies with some difficult hiring filters, perhaps start there. HN has a regular "who's hiring" thread.
From the being-hired side, I was hired by Chess.com when the CEO found my chess app on GitHub. I think that was one of his main hiring strategies - look for chess-related projects and get in touch with the authors.
But in your case, you can make someone an equal partner.
Working with you versus working for you might be an important difference for people in your existing network.
That's important because based on the lack of interest from people you know, the idea of working for you doesn't seem to hold much appeal.
Is your job to make yourself rich?
Or is it to make everyone rich?
All the work is ahead. Pick someone you want to make rich. If your network still balks, you've learned something important about how you've treated people. If someone jumps, you've also learned something important...in addition to what you have already learned.
And again, all the work is ahead. What you have done is sunk cost. You need another person to get the work ahead done. The best person has the same motivation as you.
Besides if you go unicorn, you will probably get rich enough slicing the money pie one more time.
Finally, your ability to identify smart is probably fallible. If you think most other people are stupid it surely is. Good luck.
Although if you're dealing with out-of-network candidates, you probably have the daunting issue of effective screening.
Early stage software development is tricky, but not unique.
I think someone who’s done the role before would be more valuable than someone smart.
They are also easier to find and screen.
If that's met, just do some advertising - I've found LinkedIn is useless, indeed.com gave better candidates, I'd try other "real" job sites like that.
Depending on your needs, consider part time as well which may be more attractive to some people.
One thing I did that worked was call my former university professors, they may know good fresh grades, postdocs etc.
You should be laser focused om what this person needs to do for you not what shape they might come in or where to find them. For example, you may say "we need someone to do everything tech" which I would frame as laser focused on a generalist and then write down the attributes of someone that would fit that and start sharing it.
We used angel list jobs at the time and I posted here on the monthly "who's hiring" thread.
It is going to take a lot of time to interview. Be prepared to spend money on a recruiter ($30k and up per hire) or 50% of your week (or more) talking to folks.
As you grow your team follow the "hire when it hurts" advice and make sure you know what you are bringing another body in for because it is gonna add to communication overhead. I also recommend explaining to your team why you are hiring and what you need as you grow and dont just show up with surprise hires.
Once you get your posting out there you will get good candidates.
If you are ready to pay for great talent then I can also recommend reaching out to Recurse Center for candidates. https://recurse.com
My gmail is my username (noted in my profile) if you wanna chat.