Hiring

We’re in the process of onboarding the first batch of employees at Admazely. It’s pretty awesome. Because they’re pretty awesome. There’s four of them in addition to the founding team but I’ll get back to that.

The process of finding, vetting, convincing and onboarding them has been one that has given me a lot of things to think about when it comes to the people I want to work with and the company I want to create.

I think some of it might be useful for other startup founders looking to expand their teams. And maybe to people thinking about joining Admazely some day.

The hiring process for a startup
First let me talk a little bit about the hiring process for a startup like ours. It’s tough in many ways and it’s a really delicate balance in so many different ways.

For instance, once you’ve raised money you have VCs breathing down your neck to deliver results. So you need a team in place the second you’ve raised. But of course you cannot bring the team onboard before you have the money. On the other hand, you cannot afford to wait until you have money before you start recruiting. Dilemma!

We tried to strike the balance by starting our recruitment process in November or December of 2011. Before we had a term sheet from our investor. But we felt pretty comfortable that we would get one and raise money, so we started talking to people, knowing that it would take time to find the right people, time for us to convince them and for them to convince us. So we represented a certainty of securing our funding that we didn’t always feel ourselves entirely. We didn’t lie to anyone about our financial position. Ever. But we made sure to let candidates know that we were confident about the prospects of getting the money we were looking for.

Even though we started early, we ended up learning a very hard lesson: hiring takes time. It takes a hell of a lot longer than you expect. So start early and be prepared to spend a ton of time and energy on it.

Another balance surrounding the timing aspect is finding the right people and finding them quickly enough. The better people the harder to find and convince them. The A players (I hate the term but haven’t come up with anything better myself – so will use it for now) are rarely out there looking for jobs. We decided to approach them. And be where they are. To build a brand in the developer community for ourselves and Admazely. We talked to people we believed to be great. Asked them for advice and connections. Invited strangers in for coffee on the odd chance that they might be a good fit – or know someone else who could be. We built relationships with people we might not want to hire now but would consider working with down the road.

And we decided early on that we didn’t want to hire people that weren’t A players. I believe that this was probably the most important decision we made because it ended up determining our approach to everything. It meant that we accepted taking battles with our board for not meeting our hiring deadlines (and consequently our development deadlines – because obviously we expected things to move faster). It meant that we turned down some very talented people. We literally interviewed more than one hundred people. We probably looked at close to a thousand CVs, Github repositories and LinkedIn profiles.

I don’t know if it was worth it. But I hope so. The next few months will probably prove me either right or wrong.

The company we’re building
Asking someone to join your startup is asking them to take a huge leap of faith. No matter how obviously brilliant your idea is, it’s an extremely risky bet for an outsider. We kind of knew but found out that we really had to learn to tell our story in order to get potential colleagues excited about what we’re building. It takes careful thinking and it takes practise.

As we talked to each other and as I pondered the answers to the many questions people asked us, the vision for what I wanted to build emerged.

Talent
Throughout my career (before Admazely) I’ve hired quite a few people, either as a hiring manager or as part of a group selecting a candidate for a given role. Probably around 30 or 40 in total. And I’ve worked with a few hundred people across the companies I’ve been at.

The difference between the exceptionally talented individuals and the kind-of-talented people has been an order of magnitude. Working with brilliantly bright people is so much more fun and rewarding. Working with the highest calibre talent means getting so much more done. It means getting to solutions that are significantly better.

Before Admazely I probably hired less than a handful of people that I believe to be of that calibre. There are a lot of fair reasons for compromising when in a hiring situation. One could be that you’re pressed for time – that there’s a project I desperately needed staffed. Or that the applicants I’ve received simply weren’t any better and it felt as if I needed to choose between them.

And every time I chose someone not awesome I knew it at the time. I was rarely honest with myself – came up with explanations that he or she had a bad interview or that I was just too sceptical – but every time it came back to bite me in the ass. And the handful of people that I got right proved that being ultra diligent is indeed worth the effort.

So early on, we set the barrier of only wanting to hire extremely talented people. I know that every startup founder says that he or she has a world-class team. They rarely do. They are fooling themselves and trying to fool everyone else too.

When I look around our office this morning and see the people in the room I only see people that are capable of doing things that I will never be. Computer scientists and mathematicians. PhD’s and dropouts. Students and scholars. Everyone here was coveted or highly appreciated by good companies when they decided to join us.

Attitude
In my opinion as important as talent. The knee-jerk reaction for most companies looking to fill a role is to look for someone who has done the job before. It used to be my starting point. Because that way you’ll feel confident that the person you hire can do the job. The problem with this approach is that you get people who are not stepping up to a new challenge. You get people who can essentially switch on their autopilot. You get people who take a job with you because you offer a better salary, better perks, your office is closer to home, their old boss was an asshole, etc.

I look for something entirely different today. I look for people who have done something that has given them a foundation for doing what I want them to do here – but who need to take a significant step to do what they need to do here.

In one case that has meant needing to learn a new framework (node.js), which was entirely acceptable because this individual has the concept of minimalistic evented architecture deeply ingrained in his development DNA. In another case it has meant needing to learn to work in an agile team environment after only working solo, which was entirely ok since this individual has curiosity and eagerness to learn-and-teach written all over him.

It has meant challenging people to take more personal leadership of themselves. More responsibility for product architecture.

In essence I have only hired people who have a little something to prove. To themselves or to the world. A little chip on their shoulders. Willing to take a risk. Willing to optimise the level of the challenge in front of them, not the stack of money going in to their bank account every last-of-the-month.

People with substantial egos who look a the proverbial Mount Everest and boldly claim that “of course I can get up there!” without knowing all of the unknowns in the equation first.

So while we are a quite diverse team when you look at backgrounds, we are quite similar in that one respect.

Our new guys
As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, we took a pretty long-haul approach to finding the right people. Not a single one of them are the outcome of a traditional job-posting-and-application-process.

Ollanta ended up on our radar via David’s Stockholm network. He was bored in his current job and looking for a challenging adventure. He (almost) majored in physics and math and minored in computer science. He took machine learning courses at Standford in his spare time. For an improvised six-hour programming challenge, he wrote an evolutionary algorithm in Haskell on a train ride from Stockholm to Copenhagen. The sheer combination of talent and self-confidence He’s the funniest Swedish guy I’ve met (yes David, he’s funnier than you). One of his interviews was a 48-hour session in Copenhagen that famously saw him getting shitfaced-drunk with Sylwia and David before and after a round of marathon pair-programming.

I was introduced to Chris via a person whom we interviewed and with whom we had very elaborate discussions about joining us. We maintained a close conversation and because we had managed to convey a small bit of our vision and enthusiasm, Chris started talking to us. Despite being a Java-programmer at heart he has maintained his curiosity experimenting with NoSQL databases and a bit of Ruby. And he’s the Giorgio Armani of code: less is more. He’s anal about this stuff and that’s why it’ll be so awesome to have him and David co-architect our platform. The fact that he founded (and obviously bankrupted) a micro beer brewery does make me doubt his sound judgement sometimes.

In early June, David gave a guest lecture on node.js at the Computer Science Department of Copenhagen University. It was a cool afternoon. Lots of people there, lots of interesting questions and discussion. Afterwards, Nicolai came and talked to us. His opening line was “well, once there’s a talk at DIKU (CompSci Dept @ Cph Uni) on something, you know it’s becoming mainstream – so I suppose node.js is officially rubber stamped now”. As a third-year student (interrupted by a year of fulltime work) his unpolished talent is second to only his self-confidence.

Being very active in the node.js open source community, David has a good overview of it. And that’s how we got in touch with Andreas. Still a high school student we were surprised to see the level of quality in his code and the fact that he was contributing to some of the core modules in node.js. Curious as we were, we invited him in for coffee (proverbial coffee since he doesn’t drink the real stuff) wanting to get to know him. He already had a work-remotely-gig lined up, but we figured that he might want to sit amongst other people working rather than sitting at home (we already have a another very gifted javascript programmer in a similar situation sitting here – we like to think it’s good karma). As it turned out, he liked us and vice versa. And now he’s part of the team.

Afterthoughts
For us hiring is an ongoing process. We’re hoping to hire more people within the next few months and we’re already talking to some of the ones we are considering. And whom we hope are considering us.

An important difference now compared to six or nine months ago is that we now have a pretty clear way to articulate what we’re looking for and what we have to offer. We’ll still be having a lot of informal coffee-talks (or first dates if you will) with people. Some we won’t want to hire and some we might consider. But I have come to realise that one of my most important tasks is to facilitate that we talk to the best people. So we know them and they know us.

I would encourage every startup founder to do the same.

Startup milestones

So - we recently raised money for Admazely. A good occasion to share some thoughts on the great parts of entrepreneurship. There are tons of ball-busting, teeth-grinding and knuckle-biting parts of being a startup. But when you've just raised money and are looking ahead at (hopefully) years of fulfilling your dream, the sun tends to shine a little bit more. So I'll focus on the sunny side in this post.

A while ago I read a blogpost that stuck with me. Embarrassingly, I have forgotten the author and thus can’t link and attribute appropriate credit. However, I do recall the central thesis of the post. It was simple. As a founder you have three major milestones in the early days of your venture:

1. The first person you convince to join
2. The first customer you convince to pay
3. The first term sheet

And it is so true. Each of those three are immensely fulfilling and gratifying.

Cofounders
I started out with a drawing on a piece of paper. Talked a friend into helping me turn that into a design prototype. Talked another friend into helping out with a simple proof of concept for the hard math part of my idea. Both gave a good gut-feel but it was still just me and an idea with a lot of potential.

I started my hunt for a technical cofounder. And I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Still not sure I do, but I think I’m less embarrassingly awful at talking to computer scientists now than I was a year ago. It's a process that has seen a lot of write-ups lately, including this moronic post on TechCrunch. It's a tough process. I speed-dated a lot of people, rejected a lot of them and got rejected by a few as well.

Then I met Sylwia and David. Both of them seemed to have better things to do at the time. Sylwia was freelancing while considering an offer from a well-funded startup. Instead she agreed to spend her days in my living room doing our first website and and a very very rough user interface. David was supposed to go to San Francisco for a paid internship before completing his computer science degree in Stockholm. Instead he came to Copenhagen for a few weeks, which turned into him moving in with me, both working and sleeping in my apartment for a few months. And not going to SF.

Seeing such bright and talented people chose to work alongside me seeking out the potential of an idea was immensely cool. The trusted me to make my part of our venture happen (identifying customers, talking to them, understanding what we needed to build, knowing how and when to raise funding etc.) while they applied themselves, building the product. Experiencing the change in them and in our collective thinking as we started to share a vision for what we wanted to build. And after a while I asked – and they accepted – to become cofounders of Admazely with all of the responsibility that entails.

A while in, we convinced Søren to try and work with us as well alongside his day-job at SAS Institute. Spending his spare time on Admazely instead of spending it with his wife and his newborn son wasn’t an easy decision. But he started contributing and made commitments to the project and the team.

Wow – it was pretty awesome. Things kicked into gear. It truly was a milestone for me as a founder. At the time I was too busy moving forward to pause and appreciate it. Looking back at it, it feels great. And I really encourage anyone starting up to allow for a pause to be pleased with that kind of significant progress.

Our first customers
I like the idea of the Lean Startup. I like the concept of validating your idea with customers as early as possible – ideally even before you start building it. And that’s what we did. We took the prototype to potential customers to get feedback. And feedback we got. But not only the kind we were expecting. While we were hoping for opinions that could guide product development (and we got that in abundance) we also had potential customers actively asking when they could get their hands on what we were building.

So to validate that they weren’t just sweet-talking us we asked them to sign agreements committing to buy once we were done building. And they did.

All of the sudden things became a lot more real. We weren’t just building a product – we were building a business. Real people putting their money where their mouth was.

I’m a commercial guy. I like selling stuff. And while I knew my original idea was good, this felt fantastic.

Our first term sheet
If you read blogs or TechCrunch or other stuff like that, you get the impression that VC drive around throwing truckloads of money at any entrepreneur with his hand out. They don’t. Period.

I know a lot of really smart people, with great ideas, working their asses off to realise that idea. Trying to raise money but failing. For every entrepreneur able to raise money there are 100 who are trying but failing. While the investment market in Silicon Vally and New York is supposedly frothy, the same cannot be said for most of Europe. So I agree with those that say that the best thing to do is to move to where the capital is. Partly because… well, it’s where the capital is. And partly because capital tends to cluster around talent. Or is it the other way around? So you’ll also have a better pool of talent to recruit from after fundraising.

Fairly early on we realised that we wanted to try and build Admazely big. That we didn’t have the patience to grow it organically and wanted to raise money to accelerate the development speed and quality.

We talked to potential investors. I’ve been part of a team raising money before, but I’ve never lead the effort. It’s hard work, it’s stressful and it’s people jerking you around. Networking, calling, emailing. Iterating your pitch deck. Preparing a demo. We did some things right and we did a lot more things wrong. Luckily a few of them were interested, so we set a deadline for when we wanted to receive offers. And in mid January we received our first term sheet.

Venture capitalists by definition invest in startups. Nevertheless it’s still pretty daunting to have someone who sees hundreds of startups and only has the bandwidth to make a very limited number of investments decide that YOU are his pick. To get an offer for investing in your dream. To have skilled professionals say that they believe that you and your team can build a huge company.

We chose that we wanted to work with SEED Capital, we negotiated the term sheet, signed it, worked through the due diligence and the investment closed. The press release can be found here.

Negotiating an investment is scary and tough. No matter how well you prepare, you can be certain that the VC knows more about these types of deals than you do. I highly recommend preparing. Read Mark Suster's series on raising venture capital, have a look at some of Chris Dixon's stuff, read Venture Hacks, go to Term Sheet Battle or watch the Malmö event on YouTube. Have coffee with people you know who have tried it before. If you have no one else to talk to, ping me on Twitter.

We ended up with an agreement that we are very happy with. Obviously we didn’t get everything we wanted but frankly; that’s the nature of a negotiation. But we got a deal that enables us to do what was most important to us: to build Admazely.

It’s validation and it’s hard not to get a little giddy. At the same time it’s immensely humbling. All of the sudden we are responsible not just for doing what we want to do but also for doing what the other shareholders want to do.

According to the aforementioned blogpost, it’s the final of the three milestones that an early stage startup will experience.

Now we’re moving on building the company and the product. As my old colleagues in London always said: onwards and upwards. It’s fucking awesome!