Every hire is so crucial early on and one bad hire can really set you back. I know from my experience that early hires are typically done through connections r

Every hire is so crucial early on and one bad hire can really set you back. I know from my experience that early hires are typically done through connections rather than recruitment. I am sure there are very qualified candidates overseas but finding the right guy would be seemingly much more difficult without any prior knowledge or experience with the candidate. I am sure this is very dependent on the company and technology. But generally every startup I have worked at has depended on a core group of developers early and they usually had some prior history or at least connection. I can imagine this might be different for founders without a tech background... and anecdotally that appears to be true (non tech founders appear to be more open to outsourced development). That's pure speculation.