How to Hire for Hard Tech

It's not easy!

We spend a lot of time with our companies focused on hiring, team, and culture. It’s the most important thing in Hard Tech (Vinod Khosla is well known for “the team you build is the company you build”). As a good friend once put it…‘hard time hiring means hard time making progress, which means hard time raising capital…and repeat.’

I shared some of my own views on this in my podcast with WEBOAF last year, linked here. One of the big things I’ve learned…build credibility early and often. Do things that establish your brand and relevance in the market, quickly. Highlight the scale of your ambition, a key unlock for attracting and closing the best talent. The best talent is sold, not bought (much like in venture, the best companies choose their investors, not the other way around). Make them excited to work with you!

In this paradigm, the process and decision matrix is different than traditional big company recruiting. It’s less about top of funnel and rigidity and more about developing a motion that converts key talent that will set the culture for the next decade and beyond. Process is important (Marc Andreessen wrote about that in 2007, here), but intuition is equally important. Ultimately, we want people who know how to get things done and be fun to be around while doing it.