ISO the White Whale: a Founding Engineer
why so many founders struggle with this and what to do
You’ve just raised money from top-tier investors. You’re pre-product, pre-revenue, and still figuring out what to build but your idea is one-in-a-million, you’re convinced the world needs this, and all you need now is someone brilliant to build it with. Every new founder wants to find the perfect founding engineer. Some waste months and months scouring their networks for this person and they’re surprised that the most talented engineers aren’t leaping at the opportunity to be “founding eng” at their newly minted, freshly capitalized startup.
Newsflash. Hiring a founding engineer to wander the idea maze with you is hard. Very, very hard.
Why is it so hard?
Just because you’ve raised money doesn’t mean things are significantly derisked. Most VCs are building a diverse portfolio of risks so they’re willing to take early bets based on only your background and not traction. Early engineers only get one bet. They don’t make a bet to spend their time, energy, and talents on something because of the background of the founder unless you are truly an outlier rockstar. If you’re Palmer Luckey and you sold your Kickstarter project, Oculus VR, to Facebook for $2B, you have a good chance of getting the best founding engineers for your new startup, Anduril – even if it’s risky. But most engineers will see “strong founder background + fancy investor” as still extremely risky.
The talent market is hella competitive: Everyone wants to hire talented engineers. These people have lots of options – which likely include OpenAI and Anthropic. If you’re looking for a founding engineer with 8 years of ML experience at Databricks, you need a very compelling pitch. The competition is pitching: “come make a guaranteed million dollars at OpenAI.” Keep this in mind when crafting your pitch.
Most early startups look super undifferentiated. An idea is an idea is an idea. Pre-product, pre-revenue, it’s hard for engineers to know what they’re betting on. The social proof of your background + the brand of your lead investor only gets you so far.
So what should you do?
Hire from your own personal networks. Your first couple of hires should be people who already know and trust you and have ideally worked with you before. They will prioritize their love of working with you/working together above all else. You want someone who enjoys wandering the idea maze with you and who has realistic expectations of the risk they’re taking.
Compensate founding engineers appropriately to take this risk with you. You’ll never be able to match OpenAI or Anthropic on cash comp or security – so factor that into your calculations when you think about a founding comp package that accounts for the risky bet someone’s taking and the opportunity costs of the decision they’d make to join you. 3%-10% should be on the table for a founding engineer – and well over that for a technical co-founder. This is a wide range and it depends on a range of factors like type of company, the valuation, founder experience, etc.
Have realistic expectations on seniority. Younger engineers generally have a higher appetite for risk. Yes, you ideally want someone who has “startup DNA” and experience at high growth startups, and who isn’t tarnished by the slow pace and bureaucracy of big tech, but when you think about seniority, you might want to over-rotate for slope, drive, and hunger. Hire a younger engineer who values moving fast and doesn’t expect/need as much security and isn’t as deep of a specialist in a particular area. You’ll need someone who can do a bit of everything early on and someone who is happy being an IC (in the early days, who would they be managing anyhow?).
Prioritize time-to-PMF over “forever squad.” When you’re getting started, before you have product-market fit, you should be focused on getting something into the hands of customers, experimenting with your sales motion, and iterating quickly. Your first engineer who gets v1 out the door doesn’t need to be your forever squad. We hear this from founders all the time: “I want to work in-person, in SF, in the office 5 days a week.” Be clear that when you demand those things you’re compromising on speed. Can you hire part time contractors or remote talent (talent abroad is exceptional nowadays btw!) to build v1? The person you hire first doesn’t need to be your forever person. You have a much better shot of closing the most talented forever-squad when you have some amount of traction or revenue and have, at the very least, moved the ball off the starting line.
Qual qual qual. Max out the time you can put into hiring, but figure out ways to qualify people out who are definitely not going to be the right fit. The most important qualifying factor is: does this person actually want to do a startup right now? Many people think they want to, but almost nobody does. Our completely candid advice is:
If someone is even considering bigCo roles along with startup roles, don't waste your time
Make sure anyone you spend time with has some active reason for joining a startup: upside, learning, they intend to found one themselves in the future, the fun and adventure of it, etc.
Relatedly, sell the adventure. For the right person, the fun and adventure and authenticity and the hard work are actively appealing. Sell it!
Figure out ways to appear "legitimate". Put yourself in the shoes of a potential new hire. You have no demo, no office, no website... what exactly are they joining? This is one of the places where you have to make something happen as a founder, but if you can make it feel like someone is joining something "realer" – real customers, a demo, a nice offer letter, anything – it helps a lot.
Don't get discouraged – it gets easier as you go. The first hire is a huge milestone – you're really asking someone to take a crazy risk, and if you don't have insane pedigree or some other externally legible special-ness it's just a crazy ask. But if you get one former colleague to join you, that de-risks you a lot for the next person, and if you have four people, the fifth is much easier, and so on.
Lots of founders looking for founding engineers reach out to us to present at Founders You Should Know. The FYSK showcase is a chance to present to a curated community of 200-250 talented, in-market engineers. We’ve learned over many years of running shows almost every month, reviewing hundreds of nominations, interviewing founders to feature, and having founders looking for founding engineers share their story at FYSK, that these startups don’t get a lot of traction at FYSK – precisely for the reasons we’ve mentioned above.
Our best advice? Save the opportunity to speak at FYSK for after you’ve hired your first few people and reach out to us as you’re hitting escape velocity with the product, have real – and growing – revenue, and have exhausted your own personal networks for talent. Although we have successfully helped a handful of startups find and hire founding engineers, we’ve observed that the most senior engineers in the community want to join startups that are already derisked and more stable. These are typically a bit under-the-radar but have just hit an inflection point in growth and are looking to double their team size – usually this happens just before or during a Series A. On a risk-adjusted basis, this is when most talented startup engineers want to join.
We get that founders see a founding engineer as a super high leverage hire and that most believe that hiring the right person can have make-it-or-break-it impact on the trajectory of their companies. We have an FYSK slack full of hundreds of talented community members and are happy to share founding roles with the community, so reach out with a blurb for us to share if this would be helpful. But bookmark the opportunity to present at FYSK for when you’re breaking out and can share some impressive metrics on growth, traction, and revenue. This is when you’ll get the most out of the show – and of course, we want to feature you at the point in which the opportunity will be the most valuable to you.
Until then, mine your personal networks, have realistic expectations on risk and seniority, offer appropriate compensation packages, check your own working style preferences and be willing to make some compromises to get v1 out the door. You can do a lot of brain damage and waste a ton of time hunting for the perfect founding engineer. Get traction. And until then, find the right people and sell the adventure!
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Thank you to Dan Robinson, Avery Lamp, and DK for early thoughts and feedback on this piece.
As the first engineer at Heap and now a founder himself, Dan recently hired his founding team of talented engineers in record time. He’s the perfect person to offer advice on this topic. If you’re interested in building an AI engineer, you should find a way to work with Dan at his new company, Detail.
Avery is a new founder but he’s also the extremely talented engineer every smart founder tries to recruit. We hear about all the hot startups through Avery — when great founders reach out to recruit him, he connects them to us :)
DK chose to join Google at exactly the right time of inflecting growth in 2003. Over the years he’s also started a few companies and has successfully persuaded his talented friends to join him in these quests. A few of those friends have gone on to start their own successful companies and we’ve even featured a couple of them at FYSK!
Jen is neither a founder nor an engineer but as the organizer of FYSK, she fields questions all day from founders looking to hire founding engineers. She thought writing this piece would be more efficient than repeating herself on calls. Needless to say, this piece was vastly improved by insights and expertise from Dan, DK, and Avery!