Startup Hiring 101: A Founder’s Guide. Part 10 - Gem’s founding team

We’re halfway through our series on hiring, thanks for sticking with us. In part 10 we’ll specifically discuss Gem’s founding team and how we personally recruited them.

As you can probably imagine, we used Gem in some way or another to hire most of our founding team. It was a combination of sourcing first-degree connections, referrals, sourcing 2nd-degree connections using strong connector nodes.

Here’s our founding team of eight Gems that joined between our Seed and our Series A (in rough order):

• Drew Regitsky — founding engineer, 1st-degree, a classmate from MIT.

• Jet Zhou — founding engineer, 1st-degree, a classmate from MIT.

• Jacob Hurwitz — founding engineer, 1st-degree, former coworker @ Dropbox.

• Alex Rubin — founding engineer, 1st-degree, former coworker @ Dropbox, and referral from Jacob Hurwitz.

• Joe Totten — founding sales team (first VP Sales), 2nd-degree via John Jersin (advisor to Gem).

• Einas Haddad — founding engineer, 2nd-degree via Neha Batra (a classmate from MIT).

• Mike Pinkowish — founding engineer (first Head of Engineering), 1st-degree, former coworker @ Facebook.

• Dan Cohen — founding sales team, 1st-degree, a referral from Joe Totten.

You’ll notice a few things:

1. Our team is almost entirely 1st-degree connections from places like MIT, Facebook, & Dropbox.

2. Our founding team is incredibly talented and experienced.

   • Our founding team helped us grow from $100k ARR to $1M ARR in less than a year, and we wouldn’t be here today without them.

   • Bringing on great people helped us hire more great people (you see several referrals within the founding team).

   • Hiring a great founding team helped us triple our team the next year and triple the following year again.

3. The folks who were 2nd-degree connections were connected to us via strong connector nodes.

What won’t be immediately obvious to you is the thousands of hours we spent with hundreds of candidates from our network we weren’t able to hire. A few weren’t a good fit. But most didn’t want to join our small startup. This is why spending time nurturing passive talent from your network is critical.

Up Next

In part 11, we’ll cover how to approach the initial “sales” conversation or in other words, how you can sell your candidate on your opportunity. Understanding the basics of selling & closing candidates before mastering nurturing talent or the interview process is important because you’ll want to be selling throughout the hiring process and not just at the end.

In the meantime…

• Want to use Gem for free for 2 years? Apply for our free for startups program

• You can find the rest of our Startup Hiring 101 posts on the Gem blog

• Check out the complete Startup Hiring 101: A Founder’s Guide, a comprehensive guide to startup hiring, including step-by-step instructions, example templates, and best practices