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What It Takes to Hire 10 Employees in San Francisco
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- PunchTornado 7y agosurprised that the fb ad was worth it. don't know any devs that us fb, let alone click on their ads. can a startup like that pay bay area salaries?
- sodosopa 7y agoMaybe that’s why they’re outsourcing a bulk of their work.
- bluedino 7y agoBefore anyone says "Why limit yourself to San Francisco?", they weren't looking for a remote employee.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- samschooler 7y agoTo be fair, under the "Remote" section, they really are talking about outsourcing to a remote dev shop, not about remote full time employees. I understand the benefits of having a fully co-located team, however in this article they did not address fulltime remote employees. I currently work as a fulltime remote employee for a startup with a similar team size, and we are able to iterate rapidly on product.
- jimmaswell 7y agoWhy limit yourself to wasting money renting out pointless physical offices?
- minimaxir 7y agoAlthough the existence of remote work has limited the benefits of a physical office, physical offices are not obsolete.
- jimmaswell 7y agoI say they are obsolete for programmers, video editors, graphic designers, anyone whose job consists of doing things on a computer.
- hak8or 7y agoThis is blatantly false for embedded systems developers. We spend all day with computers, key being multiple computers, all which require tons of space.
- jimmaswell 7y agoA few edge cases don't discredit the general case that physical presence is mostly useless for programmers.
- the-pigeon 7y agoObsolete isn't the word. I've worked on remote engineering teams for companies that have their non-engineering workforce go to an office for the last 6 years. There's tradeoffs. Remote is much better for some things and in the same physical office everyday is much better for certain things. There's a ton of blog posts that have been on HN over the years that go into the details of the pro and cons. But anyone telling you it better one way or another in general is full of it. All depends on the details.
- jimmaswell 7y agoThe "pros" of offices I hear are always along the lines of "I can't go interrupt people at their desks." I've yet to hear a comoelling one.
- codesushi42 7y agoThen why limit yourself to being located in SF? It's not like they are hiring people straight out of Stanford. They're getting people from bootcamps!
- jonnycomputer 7y agodid you not get applicants older than 30?
- theworld572 7y agothey weren't good culture fits
- xen2xen1 7y agoInteresting. You noticed that too huh?
- mac_was 7y agoThey prefer inexperienced, 'cheap' workforce ;) Joking obviously! I now a great dev under 30s! Not me...
- rapfaria 7y agoWould you work in a company with no one older than 30?
- fernandotakai 7y agoi don't judge people by their age -- i've had absolutely amazing young coworkers and crazy shitty older ones (and the other way around). i would 100% work at a place with younger people AND at a place with older people. it all depends on how the company's culture handled all this. (and why you are interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing you).
- davidw 7y agoThe ideal thing is a mix that is somewhat representative of the population at large. It's good to have different perspectives and attitudes and experience. Sometimes lack of experience to question 'why we do it that way', but it's also usually good to have someone who knows that we do it that way not "because", but because doing it another way can lead to subtle problems that are hard to diagnose.
- 7y ago
- ausjke 7y agostartup without VC in SF, is this still possible these days? bootstrapping can happen anywhere but not in SF these days in my opinion due to cost associated, It used to be a startup in your garage, nowadays it's called lean-startup with remote peers(sometimes overseas to save costs further)
- opportune 7y agoYou say it yourself, you pretty much have to go lean to do an effective bootstrapped startup, and focus on profitability very quickly. Otherwise the salary costs will kill you unless you have very deep pockets. One model that I would like to see more of is a type of co-op, maybe even part time. This allows you to defer payment in lieu of equity, at the obvious cost of not having people's attention as fulltime employees, and slower iteration time. The benefit is that you can actually get FAANG caliber engineers to work with you since you are paying entirely in equity
- ausjke 7y agophysically, to make startup a success out of 99% failure rate, you have to laser focused with a small capable team to break through somewhere. A loose team is really hard to make profit before everyone is burned out. Hiring is painful, or the most painful plus it's super time consuming and distracting, finding nice peers sharing equity is even harder, harder than finding a wife on tinder I feel. I don't have better ideas though.
- opportune 7y agoI think I would have an easy time finding peers to share equity from my personal network, although I could only know for sure when push came to shove and it was actually time to start working. But yeah it could be really hard running an actual business where everyone is only working 8-25 hr/week. For it to be viable, you would need to focus on getting an MVP up fast and reaching ramen-profitability. Then once there's enough money for everyone to pay their bills, you could start transitioning people to fulltime. Again since you are sharing equity generously, as long as you find like-minded peers, ramen profitability for each employee/co-founder is all you need
- akozak 7y agoThis focuses on hiring channels - but wouldn't an economist recommend competing on salary/equity or other benefits? Why isn't that a part of the strategy in such a competitive labor market?
- acangiano 7y ago> Remote Hires > When it was difficult to hire, we considered outsourcing engineering work to an external dev shop. Outsourcing and remote hires are two completely different things.
- jgmmo 7y agoThis. I expected the 'Remote Hires' section would discuss why they needed a local dev, and why a virtual/home-based hire would not work. This section should have been named 'Outsourcing' - since that is what they actually discuss in that paragraph. Indeed, hiring a fulltime offsite employee is very different from outsourcing to a 3rd party.
- normalperson 7y agoThis line clearly demonstrates they did not think too deeply about modern firm organization.
- sodosopa 7y ago“We spent less than $1,000 on hiring And “I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates” The real cost is over $1,000 unless the value of your time is $0. Also, as someone else commented. So out of hundreds you interviewed, it doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired. What did the age breakdown look like? Ageism does exist in tech.
- joshyg 7y agoi am the first employee and I am over 30.
- sodosopa 7y agoAny over 40?
- crispyporkbites 7y agoCan they afford or even attract people with 20 years of experience?
- sodosopa 7y agoDid they interview anyone with that experience?
- lsc 7y agoIf they only have $120K budget, they are interviewing for relatively junior positions in this area and at this time, and thus they are mostly going to get young people interviewing. I mean, a lot of times this is coded in the job descriptions. "rockstar ninja" "10x engineer" or similar words generally mean they are unable to pay experienced people wages and are looking for someone new to do the work of an experienced person. A lot of people think this is bad, as it almost always implies overwork, but I have mixed feelings. My first programming job? I was 17, no education, and I was hired as a "Staff Programmer" but only paid slightly under $40K (this was in '97, so while that was great money for a 17 year old, that was... not market rate for an experienced engineer, much less a "staff" level title.) In a lot of ways it was a great experience for me. My shitty C code ran on production and in turns vastly improved and degraded user experiences for literally millions of people. For a company that wants to 'roll the dice' - I was probably a good deal, 'cause I did some pretty amazing things. (in both directions, really... but it did work out well sometimes?) (I can't find the quote right now... by Vixie; something about how many CERT notices he was responsible for, and how it showed that in his youth, he could code, but he didn't learn to manage risk until later.) But, I mean, my experience of the valley (and SF is not silicon valley, but it is... adjacent.) is that startups hiring young people can partly be explained by the phenomena that startups aren't willing to pay market rate for someone with experience; even at my age, I see pressure to move to management. If something bad happened and I had to work at a startup again, one of the big tells I'd look for would be the number of older engineers that are working as direct hires (not contractors); This is usually a good indicator that they are willing to pay reasonably.
- codesushi42 7y agoProblem: What does it takes to hire 10 employees in San Francisco? Solution: Don't hire in San Francisco. And not limiting your hiring pool to hip millennials could also help.
- collinstevens 7y agoThey look barely old enough to make the millennial cutoff.
- moltensodium 7y agoThey forced the one guy who is over 30 to post and say he's over 30, so they managed to fight their age discrimination with a 31 year old. This is the most unintentionally depressing post I have read in a long, long time. I really don't think I can keep working in tech much longer.
- codesushi42 7y agoFollowed by a flurry of downvotes that are undoubtedly from HN accounts at the company.
- hackerjules 7y agoomg they think we're hip
- chillydawg 7y agoHaving gone on the journey of trying to spend the absolute minimum on recruiting to now effectively not caring what recruiters charge I think that paying, say, 15k for a strong senior engineer is a bargain. Stop wasting time generating leads at a pitiful rate, pay a pro to do it and concentrate on actually running your team and shipping product.
- bmiller2 7y agoMy experience has been that HR stonewalls all efforts to use external recruiters due to perceived cost. Yet at the same time they can’t deliver quality candidates so a position stays open for 6 months; incredibly infuriating.
- chillydawg 7y agoUnfortunate to be in your position. My solution is to not have HR and be a tiny company where we can happily ignore that kind of tedium.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago> “not have HR” and that’s how you get bully psychopath CEOs sexually harassing people, infusing their religious / racist biases on the hiring process, etc. Would much rather have HR + bureaucratic tedium than to be beholden to unbridled CEO whims.
- wffurr 7y agoHR doesn't prevent any of that.
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoCompared to how it manifests without HR constraints, boy it absolutely does. Are there examples of these bad behaviors in big companies? Sure, and that’s hardly the point.
- situational87 7y agoFrom the photo I'm guessing you started your hiring process with: 1. Throw away any resumes from old people
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoOr this was implicit ageism based on the peanuts salary & meaningless options comp package.
- elpakal 7y ago> Even though Kapwing is doing well, we didn’t get a single referral through our investors Is this common?
- gist 7y agoWhen you look at some of the ideas that are being done you have to think that the idea here is simply the investors are funding acquihire special purpose vehicle (for lack of a better way to put it). That is they invest in a company that they know has less than a solid chance of working out long term because of a good idea (or even forking to a better idea). And they know this. Then what happens is they have one of their other investments acquire the company a few years later as well as the fully vetted workforce.
- gwbas1c 7y agoI wish I knew an estimate of hour much time went into each hire. Specifically, how much of the founder's (or CEOs, ect) time went into each hire.
- homonculus1 7y ago>matching corporate-logo-patch jean jackets ew
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aresant 7y agoOne item in particular you note is that Recruiters are "Not Worth It" But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried that route. In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First-degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out. I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter" and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role. Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates, and delivered strong hires. We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis I can't think of better money that we've spent. The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering + reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high return investment categories in my view. And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr range. PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on boostrapping hiring!
- com2kid 7y agoI'll second this, I've worked with a few really good recruiters. Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing candidates in a matter of days. You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch with great people. The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.
- seibelj 7y agoI will third this, I have a specific recruiter who works at an agency who I find superb. I always use her for hiring if possible. She finds solid candidates and takes the time to understand what you need, works her network, filters out what you don't like, and pitches your company properly. Well worth the fee if you can get the right person!
- mandeepj 7y ago
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago> angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company LOL, name and shame, I'm looking to poach some people from a place that's so scared of this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gunnihinn 7y ago> [Cold outreach] Rating: Not successful. Kapwing’s most senior engineer said that he gets multiple cold emails from recruiters daily, so it seems impossible to cut through the noise. You are the noise.
- GVIrish 7y agoI think the thing that a lot of people doing cold outreach really don't understand this. Pinging someone on LinkedIn with, "Hey we have a job!" is not differentiating you from the other 10 people that contacted that person this week. But a good engineer already has a job. What makes your job's value proposition attractive enough that this gainfully employed engineer should engage with you? One easy way to set yourself apart is to tell people what salary range you're working with up front. A good senior engineer is probably already getting paid well, so if your salary range is attractive, they're much more likely to respond. If they're not getting paid what they're worth, you may get their attention immediately. If your salary range is too low, your response rates will reflect that. Beyond salary, find a way to communicate the most attractive and unique features of the job up front. Don't start with, "we have PTO, health insurance, 401k, etc." because almost everyone offers that. What sets your company apart? What about the work is compelling and interesting?
- p1esk 7y agoTo me it's different when a founder/hiring manager contacts me about a job, rather than a recruiter. On LinkedIn ~90% of job messages are from recruiters, once you filter them out, not many are left, and I typically respond, even if with just "Thanks for reaching out, I'm not available currently".
- scarejunba 7y agoI don't want to hear about the salary right off the bat. That's the least interesting part about things. Founders looking for early engineers should take a different tack. After all, I'm not going to be employee 3 just for high comp. The task had better be damned interesting.
- jedberg 7y agoThe article says their best channels were friends and referrals via friends. As Patty McCord likes to say, the first 20 hires are easy, you just hire your friends and their friends. It's the next 100 that are tough, because at that point you've exhausted all your friends. Edit: fiends to friends.
- WalterBright 7y agoI usually try to exhaust all my fiends, so they'll stop bothering me.
- croisillon 7y agoI'd never get a job there as I have no denim in my wardrobe
- andyv 7y agoI had the same thought, but then noticed that the jackets are company jackets.
- andrewstuart 7y agoThis article is arguing strongly for the core value of the recruiter - time saving. True that founders must spend time recruiting, but this person has essentially turned the job of company founder into the job of recruiter. Founders should have better things to do than make the incredible time commitment this person describes. OK recruiters cost money, but isn't the founder's time worth something? >> I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. This is not how to do recruiting, it's wasteful of the recruiter and the job seekers time. The first interview should be a phone interview and it should be sufficiently detailed that any in person meeting coming out of it appears to meet many of the requirements. If you are doing hundreds of coffee meetings then you're wasting vast amount of time. It may sound trivial but the denim thing is signalling "young".
- p1esk 7y agoShe preferred people from coding bootcamps rather than fresh CS graduates from good schools? Does not really make sense...
- ta1234567890 7y agoIt makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers. They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do. There's only so much pre-training you can do. Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.
- p1esk 7y agoPart of the value a good school provides is learning how to get along with teammates, during many class projects one has to do to graduate from a good CS program. Re passion: you need a lot more of that to be "constantly learning and solving problems" for 4 years, rather than for 3 months. What do you think people do in college? Party non-stop?
- maxaf 7y ago> What do you think people do in college? Party non-stop? Yes, that's exactly what they do.
- commandlinefan 7y agoNobody parties harder than CS majors.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- potta_coffee 7y ago
- crusso 7y agoI also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely didn’t work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company. Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- opportune 7y agoYeah, I find it super useful as an employee. You can get tons of spam mail but it's worth it when that company you really want to work for reaches out. Of course, that means from a recruiter's perspective, when you are cold-messaging you need to be able to differentiate from the other cold-messages people are receiving, get their attention, seem like some place they would want to work, and be attractive enough that people are willing to quit their current job for you. That's hard if you're not a recognizable name and, with all due respect, not working on something really sexy. Otherwise you are just noise.
- gamblor956 7y agoLinkedIn is very useful to people outside of the tech community, especially those in law, accounting, and HR. It's also fairly useful for people in other white-collar job fields. Anecdota, but still data: I know close to a dozen people "1st degree network contacts" (i.e., former co-workers) who found new jobs through LinkedIn...without needing to go through a recruiter. I used a recruiter to find my current position...but I found the recruiter through LinkedIn.
- southphillyman 7y agoI never got contacted by FAANGs until I got on Linkedin and made my account public. Seems like it has value in exposing people to big companies that otherwise might not have you in their network.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoInteresting take-aways. Surprisingly, investors didn't bring any good referral. These are the investors from their Crunchbase page [0]: - Kleiner Perkins - Sinai Ventures - Bryan Rosenblatt - Village Global - ZhenFund - Shasta Ventures - Ron Drabkin - Riverside Ventures One day it would be nice to really, deeply measure how investors contribute to their portfolio companies. [0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section-investors https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section-inve...
- delinka 7y agoI know VCs like to appear as if they provide an advisory role. I don't know how many actually contribute more than capital to their portfolio companies, my guess would be that you have to seek out a reputable company that provides more than money to get more than money.
- codezero 7y agofwiw, having been at a company from 6-160 people, early stages, investors aren't a great source of ICs. They end up a lot more useful when you are hiring senior leadership and an executive team. These roles align better with their own personal and professional networks. We had a little luck tapping YC and YC alums early on though to some extent, and posting job reqs here on HN definitely helped.
- mbesto 7y agoIt's generally a signal for hiring and sales/marketing, similar to how universities create prestige for individuals. Highly subjective and immeasurable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- quotemstr 7y agoWhy San Francisco? Of all the tech cities in the country, why choose the most overheated and the worst managed? Seattle is right over there.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Animats 7y agoWell, the application, a web-based image editor, is kind of retro. Those go back to Ofoto, 1991, which became Kodak Gallery. Which failed. Not likely to become big.
- pugworthy 7y agoAm I the only person to search if "What It Takes" was the name of a new startup?
- iamleppert 7y agoTheir products are meme generators and what appears to be a frontend on ffmpeg. Not sure this kind of work couldn't be outsourced for bottom dollar rates overseas?
- graphememes 7y agoOn average a startup < 200 employees will spend around 15k+ on hiring efforts anyway. Recruiters can simplify, and streamline the process. Had many high quality recruits that stayed 2+ years with the company from recruiters. It is a huge myth that the hiring experience with recruiters is poor. It is a huge myth that the quality is low. Find the right recruiter. Get good candidates. The onus is on you to do your research. Not a recruiter. Just someone who has worked with some amazing recruiters in the past. I've interviewed thousands of candidates, hired many of them, passed on quite a few. Hiring is always the same. Don't make it harder.
- normalperson 7y agoTo me, it is totally demented to spin up an engineering org in the most expensive metro area in the world. Any company founded today should be remote-ONLY. Don't believe the boomer lies.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThe part on recruiters is very so so. $15K in fees,in a place like SF,where devs don't come cheap, is peanuts. Meeting tens of candidates means a lot of time spent not doing something else, something more important,so the cost doesn't become lower. There are some crappy recruiters out there, however a good one would not just get a good candidate but also save a lot of time.
- chrismckleroy 7y agooof, jean jackets
- rsynnott 7y ago> We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates Must’ve gotten a discount on the coffee.
- CyanLite4 7y agoFairly obvious from their pictures that they don’t hire minorities and their recruiting shows why.
- scarejunba 7y agoReally? The photos that include a photo with one white guy, one Asian guy, and one black guy talking about who they trust for referrals makes it _obvious_ that they don't hire minorities?
- CyanLite4 7y agoIf your company only has “one black guy” you should reconsider your diversity strategy. And is anyone there a day over 25 years old?
- scarejunba 7y agoWell, I suppose the real question is what you expect. Assuming no racial bias I would assume that hiring rates mirror local demographics. Well, about 7% of the Bay Area is black (SF itself is less so let's just bias upwards a bit here). So, given that any hire has a 7% chance to be black and a 93% chance to be non-black, that gives us a 45% chance there are no black employees, an 82% chance there is at most one black employee, and a 96% chance there are at most two black employees, assuming no bias. As for the other question, yes, there is a 31 year old there. Listen, I'm going to be honest with you: I'm in my 30s too, and there is no age bias against 30-year-olds in SF.
- OrgNet 7y ago"free housing"
- sadness2 7y agoYour team appears to lack diversity with regards to age, and your conclusion makes it sound like that was almost a goal. Older engineers can offer a lot of wisdom and save a lot of wasted effort
- sadness2 7y agohttps://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
- gwm83 7y agoI'd assume they had a salary boundary that excluded experienced individuals who expected more money.
- bradlys 7y agoSeed stage startup. Extremely likely it's not just salary but also equity. How many highly experienced individuals are going to join a seed stage startup as a regular employee? It's founder or no deal with early startups for most people I know above 40. You join as regular employee - maybe get 1-3% at the high end. Founder? Order of magnitude more.
- draw_down 7y agoI will say that dressing everyone up in the same jacket was a funny way of demonstrating diversity.
- garbre 7y agoHoly ageism, batman!
- mLuby 7y agoSmall nit-pick: Remote hires and outsourced teams are very different things. Hiring full-time remote individuals is great if your company puts in the work to be remote-friendly. Successful outsourcing work to a dev shop (usually remote to some degree) depends on your ability to communicate your product's technical needs precisely.
- glloydell 7y agoThe fact that the article states the cost of $1000 at the outset is a bit disturbing given that it goes on to describe the intense amount of time and effort taken in the search for hiring. It indicates to me that the person writing this article doesn't consider their time to be valuable, and raises all sorts of red flags about how they would value the time and energy of their employees. Throw in the combination of the shared jean jackets and incredibly forced (almost desperate) smiles in the Hero/Footer image and the cult vibe is overwhelming screaming RUN AWAY. Is this a coded cry for help? Should we rescue these developers?
- glloydell 7y agoI'm going to double down on this one. I poked around their site and read the blog post on their flyer campaign : https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-francisco/ https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-francisco/ And it ends with this quote : "By the end of our 8-hour workday, we had: - Put up 352 posters - Spent $96.16 ($31.08 for tape + $65.08 for printing) - Taken 25,497 steps - Walked 11.2 miles - Used over 400 ft of tape" Nowhere in there does it say anything about the cost of paying the people to do that work. They're very clearly and plainly stating that they do not put any value on the time of their employees.
- dennisgorelik 7y agohttps://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/kapwing https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ... Kapwing has 1 Funding Round totaling $1.7M --- https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com In the last 6 months, kapwing.com traffic grew from 1.75 M to 3.3 M Total Visits per month. 3.3 M Visits per month is, usually, a good result on $1.75M investment.