I've been trying to hire our first engineer for a year, and I can't find anyone. And it's not because there's literally no one with the word engineer on their resume that they can hire, right? Hello, this is Michael with Harj & Brad. Welcome to Inside the Group Partner Lounge. So as YC Group Partners, we find ourselves repeating the same advice over and over again to startups. Before COVID, we'd often gather together in the Group Partner Lounge at the YC office to try to figure out why this was the case and how we could help startups figure it out faster. But now that we're all online, we're doing it in front of all of you. Today, we're going to talk about startup hiring.
So Harj, frame this challenge for us because man, this is something that we debate founders with all the time. Yeah. So one of the most common things founders tell us they need to do during a YC batch is hire. And one of the most common bits of advice we give is to not hire. This is something we should talk about. And like, you know, where we sort of have headwinds in giving this advice is if you look at the list of the top YC companies or top startups, they have thousands of employees. So obviously you do have to hire in order to build a big company. We totally get that. And so when we give this advice to the startups to not hire so much, a lot of, you know, there's a little word out there saying, oh, like YC partners don't get how to build companies. Like, you know, you need to hire, you need to like really ramp up your hiring.
And so we have to find like the right level of advice that lands with founders and gets them to make the right decisions. Yeah, for me, when I think about this challenge, what's tricky is that almost all the advice that's written online about hiring is written for post-product market fit companies. Folks that are products that users love and those companies trying to scale up to offer that product to more and more people. Most startups are pre-product market fit. So now we confront this like very large dilemma, like you're reading advice for a stage that not only are you not at now, but odds are you will never be at.
And it turns out if you apply that advice to your pre-product market fit company, you might accelerate your death. So how do you deal with that? That's the challenge. So Brad, why don't you start? What are the lies that YC founders and founders in general tell themselves about why hiring will solve all of their problems? Sure. We'll jump into a couple of them. So the big one is the thought that if you only have more people, we could get more things done.
I hear this every week from founder. We need more features, Brad. We don't have enough features. That's right. We need to get the Android app out. We need to get the iOS app out. We need specialists for each of those different apps. I've even had people tell me that we need to hire more people so that we can reach profitability faster.
Do those people bring, are they somehow paying the company instead of like their salary? They're receiving negative salaries. That's an interesting business model. Fascinating. Harsh, how about you? What are you hearing as the reasons why founders give to hire away? Yeah, I think another one is just, it's a marker of progress. And so founders feel like investors will be more impressed with them if they have more employees. I think they feel like customers will be more impressed. And yeah, it risks becoming like a KPI, right? That you focus on. It feels good to your friends too. You're like, oh, like, you know, how's it going to be doing? You're like, oh yeah, we're at like a hundred employees now. So I think like, you know, things must be going great.
I think this is one of those fun stats that second-time founders react to differently than first-time. I remember when we were all going through YC, number of employees might have been the primary KPI for every one of our companies. And I feel as though after managing people, I'm like, oh God, if I could just do it with fewer people. That brings up another set of lies that founders tell themselves, and we all told ourselves at some point, which is that just because you are a startup founder doesn't mean that you are good at hiring and managing people. And I think the first time around, you don't know that. And the second time around, maybe you do know that, that you are not good at those things yet.
And I think some of that is because when you're running your company, you're thinking about all these problems that the company has, all the problems that you're carrying around in your head. And then you magically hear that some smart person is available or looking for a job. And so that's another lie you can tell yourself is that I should hire that person because they're available. This is an opportunity that I need to seize. The thing is, though, is that some companies do that, but they are very large companies that have product market fit, not your startup right now. Google does that well. Yeah, I think it's also a confidence thing. So sometimes when I'm talking to founders, I feel like what happens is once you're a startup founder,
you kind of forget how hard it is to make the leap to start a company and try and go from like zero to one on anything because you're just like slapped in the face by reality every day. And so like early stages, like the stages we're doing with companies, right? Like the challenge is in just figuring out like what's the first experiment to run, whether it's like sales, marketing, product or whatever. And it's really tempting when someone like comes along who's got a resume where they were like VP of sales at some company you recognize, like, oh, wow, like sales problem fixed. And like you underestimate like...
And like the tenured VP of sales might be amazing at managing a team of like a hundred salespeople, but like they are probably not as good as you at figuring out like how to make the first sales call, like how to get the first 10 customers, like all this stuff that you would assume they could do, but they might be totally lost. And I think that's actually more common, right? Like you guys see that when you're talking to these companies and you're like, man, like you're a founder, like you're like, you have a unique skillset, you know, you can't hire for that. Like, you know the problem probably better than anyone else. You certainly know how your product works better than anyone who's selling it, right? Way better. Yeah, that's the way that that looks like in my office hours is someone shows me.
a plan to hire some people and we have to go down the list and I have to say over and over again, that's your job. No, that's your job too. That's your job right now. Because there's just nobody else that can do a lot of the things that the founders do at this stage. You can't hire for some of this stuff, like figuring out what the customer wants, figuring out how to adjust your product so that it does the things that they need it to do. That's the founder's job.
What about this one, Harj? I think you've seen this one. Like, I need an exec team. It's time to start hiring execs. Like, I never quite understand why, like, do you have any experience with, like, why that happens? Like, what triggers that in someone's head to be like, oh, now it's time. I need an exec team.
I think it's the cargo culty thing, right? It's like, there's just so, like the majority of startup advice and stories that are out there are from the already successful companies. And so if you look on the surface of, ah, like, let me go look at the about page of Airbnb. Ooh, like chief operating officer, chief blah, blah, blah officer. Like, all those squares on my team page are missing. So I better like go hire those people in, right? I think a lot of it comes down to that. Yeah. And I think a lot of times when I see it, it's because the founders already have the relationship with the person. Maybe it's someone they've worked with before or they've known in some other context for a while. And they figure, well, I'm going to hire this person eventually. I might as well hire them now.
And that person just wants the fancy title because that's important to them for legitimate reasons. But it doesn't mean that it's a good idea to bring them on right now before you have product market fit. You know, the other one I see a lot, and I actually had office hours today on this subject, was a founder saying to me, it's like, well, we know we're going to have this problem in the future. So we might as well just hire the person who can solve it now. And it was so funny because I was like.
as an advice giver, here's how we get in trouble. Like, this is what I explained to them. I was like, well, your startup has like one or two, six alarm fires burning any given time, right? And those are where you should really be focused. But there's also like 50 smoldering fires, right? There's like 50 little smoke coming up, right? Some of them's gonna turn into big fires, some of them are not. And I always get yelled at when I tell people, don't hire people or worry about the little, you know, the little smoke coming out somewhere else.
And the finder always comes back to me a year later and it's like, well, one of those 50 things turned into a fire and I saw it. And if I had only done this, we could prevent it. And I'm like, but the 49 other ones did it. And so like, it's still better to fight the fire after it's like a massive fire. And I think that that's intellectually frustrating.
right like you you almost feel like you should be able to predict the future and act where so much of the startup is just reacting to when things are horribly broken i love the old like you know we know what we need to hire because we know what's going to happen in the future i mean especially the last couple of years like can you imagine like you know like airbnb like covid hits that kind of changed up their business uh you imagine like instacarturing amazon buying whole foods like that probably changed up the business like there's just it's just like yeah like when you're at the earliest earliest stages every like you need to be able to turn the ship like very quickly on a dime kind of you just don't know what's going to happen and i think that's what founders don't appreciate it's like when you when you don't have product market fit you're really early and you just kind of need to take it day by day almost and like the bigger the ship is the more people you've got to now coordinate to like get them rowing in the same direction and turn the ship and if it takes you like three months to turn the ship you might be dead like boom so let's let's go to the devil's advocate side though so you know hard you brought this up like the first point which i think is like really important is like if you're going to be a big company you're going to have a lot of employees eventually right like can you speak to that you know Big companies do have a lot of employees. Valuable companies have a lot of employees. It's true. And again, this is where the advice is nuanced and has to be personalized, right? So when we're doing office hours, it's why we care so much about figuring out what's your growth rate? How much runway do you have? Just so we can get a read on, okay, what kind of company are you? And if it's a post-product market fit and things are going well, accelerating, that's when you start hiring.
But if you're not, then the advice is not to. And again, if you look at all the top YC companies, yes, they have more employees. But Michael, you've been there. You can see this. Airbnb, they didn't hire 1,000 employees in the first year, right? Those employee hiring counts are pretty backloaded. Well, let's take Airbnb as an example, right? So we'll screw with history a little bit and just say that they launched at that South by Southwest in the beginning. That would have been about six months before getting into YC. I think that means that outside of the founders, it took them 18 months to hire their first employee before their first event. 18 months. And it was six months post graduating from YC and raising money.
And it was funny because, you know, the first person they hired was an engineer and it was two designers, one engineer. And Nate was like drowning. And they still took six months to find someone who was great. And that helped establish the culture. I remember Stripe being very similar to that. Stripe, like, they certainly hired people, right? But they certainly had a team. And if anything, actually, Stripe was a little, like, it went against the conventional wisdom because I think it had a team of maybe eight to ten people pre-launch. But, like, the product took a while to kind of launch publicly. And just, like, I think they were just, like, three people for, like, the first year, at least, and possibly 18 months. So, again, the timelines are probably, like, have a bit of margin of error in them. But the point is, like, they really hired slowly at the start and then ramped up when they started becoming these, like,
machines and rocket ships. So like another devil's advocate position is that like sometimes the specialist can save the company a lot of money. So we actually encountered this in Justin TV and Twitch, where we hired someone from YouTube who worked on scaling out their video infrastructure. And that person, his name is John, was ridiculously helpful in saving us a ton of money. Like he taught us about free peering. Like he taught us everything. I think that what's interesting, though, is that John wasn't the first person that worked on video. Kyle, co-founder, VP Engineering, was the first person. He built the video system. And like we only brought on John when we had the problem of spending too much money on bandwidth. And then.
he was the appropriate specialist to help us. But like our first problem wasn't spending too much money. Our first problem was nobody cared to watch video on a product. So saving money wasn't really the problem. Any of these other general advocate positions you guys thinking about? Yeah. The other broad thing though, that's good to acknowledge is that every CEO that ever gives a talk, any successful CEO that ever gives a talk about what they do and their most important skill always says hiring. And so yes, you're going to, as a founder, you're going to have to learn how to hire. You're going to have to build those muscles and get really good at it. Our job though at YC is to say like, that's not the most important muscle to be building right now.
So yes, you will get good at it. Tuck that away in your brain, but just not right now. That's not the thing that's on fire to figure out. Yeah, I think if we move to the takeaway here, what's so interesting is I find it so interesting how often YC is critiqued on these points, to be completely honest. Like I think about what a normal VC, someone who sits on a board, what most of their experience is with is with post-product market fit companies. Whereas what most of our experience with is with pre-product market fit companies. And so I can see why both founders hate our advice because nobody wants to be told their pre-product market fit. And like VCs are like, oh, like you guys know what you're doing. Like da, da, da, da.
But what's so weird is that the smartest founders somehow kind of innately get this. Like the smartest founders, I find like they don't want to sit in a room of 30 people when they're trying to figure out a really hard problem. Like that's never how they succeeded in their past. And so it's interesting how they somehow innately get, oh, a smaller number of really smart people are probably going to figure this out way better than a large number of mediocre people. I also feel like with the highest quality founders, they have just such high standards for who they want to work with that part of the reason why they're like, oh, man, it's so challenging to find. I've been trying to hire a first engineer for a year, and I can't find anyone. And it's not because there's literally no one with the word engineer on their resume that they can hire. It's just because they have super high standards, as you should.
It was funny. We always had this saying in the company that every hire should increase the average IQ of the company. And whenever you start thinking about new people that way, you're like, maybe we could do it ourselves. We don't need that person. I think another interesting thing is this quality of, and Harj, I think you said it, the instinct to overhire. It seems like whenever we encounter hiring advice, the instinct to hire is always like, I need more people, I need more people, I need more people.
And I think that like what those people never get is that overhiring leads to higher burn leads to lower runway. Like they never make those connections. And whenever we see a company post YC that's running low on money, it's almost always. employee burn, right? It's almost always salary burn. It's never some service they're using or some like, it's always employees. Like I've never had a company say, I'm failing because we have so much money in the bank. We hear all the time, I'm failing because we're running out of money and because they hired too many people. You know, another thing I often see is like good quality founders. Like one of the main causes of burnout is also like people problems. And thus they realized that they just didn't, it turns out that they thought they were going to love managing and having a great team and it'd feel awesome. And it turned out to actually just drain all of their energy.
And so again, like you've got to hire people and those are inevitable, but you can say like, it's what you were saying before, Michael, right? Like when you speak to like the second time or the super successful founders, they're always like, man, like I remember the days when it was just like five of us in a room and like, you know, like it's just like, it was like an energizing time. And I find that sometimes the founders who overhire, like it can be a lot more draining and cause burnout than you'd imagine. Yeah. I mean, if we assume that there's a 5%, 10% chance of any reasonable hire ending up being toxic and making it really unfun to work at the company, you know, who knows what the actual odds are, but like, those aren't great. It's better to just not play that game. I love it. Let's do that, right? 5% to 10% chance of just like a horrible fit, toxic culture. And you only let go of 10% of the people you hire because of course you're an amazing hire. And you have a team of 25 people. Like, boom, like you hate your life. That's almost like an equation for hating your life. At any given time, you probably have...
toxic people in your inbox every day. So maybe the way to wrap this up is that if you're post-product market fit, ignore everything we talked about. Go crazy, hire away. If you're pre-product market fit, double down on everything we've talked about. Hiring is probably not your savior. If you're confused and you don't know whether you're post or pre-product market fit, don't hire to figure that out. Like figure that out first and then make this decision on whether you should hire or not. And perhaps you'll come to a better conclusion. All right, Brad Hart, great to see you guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks.