Growing faster than you can hire?
How an FYSK investment supports your team building efforts now and forever
It’s a tale as old as time (or, since the 1970s): you just raised your Series A and you need to double your engineering team. With a new $10m of capital sitting in your pockets, paying top talent isn’t the problem — it’s finding it. Unfortunately, you have a high bar for talent, and you’ve exhausted your personal network. You’ve already hired your ex-roommate’s former coworker’s CS 61B lab partner from his days back in Berkeley. What now?
Top engineers don’t reply to cold LinkedIn InMails, and they’re definitely not going to scour the web for the AI engineer listing you posted 24 days ago. Honestly, if you were looking for a job, you wouldn’t either. You’d turn to your friends, your old coworkers, your former boss, etc. Why? Great people know great people — the most talented people you know are far more likely to tell you about the next under-the-radar, explosive growth startup that’s hiring, or refer you to their old roommate who’s looking for talent that matches your profile. At this stage, even the best recruiters in the business can’t access the pool of talent that comes to our showcases.
Founders You Should Know is solving this problem for our 15 portfolio companies, and yours could be next. We know the best engineers sometimes take months to hire, and it’s important to start these relationships early. With a small Founders You Should Know check on your cap table (typically $100K - $200K), we’ll help you assemble the best team now and for the entire life of your company. We run a bespoke matching program exclusively for our founders — send us the open roles you’re hiring for, and we’ll make bespoke introductions for you to talented members from our (constantly growing!) community who would be perfect for your role. Dozens of top-notch engineers apply to FYSK every day because they love our showcase and trust our curation. Many of our LPs are engineers and founders as well, and are there to support and extend your network.
With a small Founders You Should know check on your cap table, we’ll help you assemble the best team now and for the entire life of your company.
Attending our showcases and being a part of our community will always be free, whether or not we invest in your company. Every month, we curate 12 startups that have the inflecting growth, customer traction, and revenue to be exciting opportunities for our community to consider joining. We’ve been fortunate to feature startups like Anthropic, Cursor, Writer, and hundreds of others way before it was obvious to everyone else that these were rocket ships. Since we featured Anthropic and Writer, they’ve 10x’d. Cursor has more than tripled in revenue since Michael Truell presented at our showcase. The bar to be in the room, let alone onstage, is high; this leaves our founders with top talent, and our community with the best opportunities. As a portfolio founder, you get the additional benefit of periodically attending our showcases. You’ll continue to build new relationships and receive shoutouts onstage for whatever you need most at the moment — whether that be more engineers or customers.
Our community attracts the engineer who lives next door, the friends-of-friends, and everything in between. Since we invested in SmarterDX, they’ve made 2 senior hires from our community. After Clarence Chio met 4 new team members from our community for Unit21, he turned to FYSK when he left to build the team at Coverbase.
We find our investment is most valuable to you if you’re building a challenging software-levered business, where engineering talent is key to growth. This could be anything from dev tools and data infrastructure to AI, consumer applications, and healthcare. As long as you’d get value out of meeting the best software engineers in the world, we could be a good fit. Reach out to us before you put together your Series A financing round; recruiting the most senior engineers takes time, so you’ll want to start developing your relationships and pipeline early. If you think we could be helpful partners in your journey, let us know at jen@foundersysk.com.