Benjamin Friedman’s Post

Imagine this job ad today: "Wanted: team members for a mission with uncertain success, low pay, extreme discomfort, and a good chance of never coming back. Glory if we succeed!" That's the kind of brutal honesty Shackleton used to recruit his legendary crew. In today’s startup world, we often see the opposite—exaggerated perks and promises. While attracting talent is crucial, are we glossing over the challenges and setting people up for disappointment? Shackleton’s method teaches us that transparency can build a committed team. When people know what they’re signing up for, they’re more likely to stay the course. Think about it—if we were upfront about the struggles, wouldn’t we attract those genuinely aligned with our mission? Embrace the chaos, highlight the potential for impact and growth, and throw in a bit of Shackleton’s grit. What if our job ads reflected the true startup experience? Would we find our own band of adventurers? #RealTalk #StartupLife #Leadership #compensation

3 Momentum Killers for Early Founders Early-stage founders often make three critical mistakes that kill momentum: Lack of Focus: In the early days, everything seems like a good idea, making it challenging to create momentum. We teach the Scaling Credo to help narrow your focus and create sustained progress. Wrong Hires: Knowing your strengths and hiring to complement them is crucial. Identify what you do well and what you enjoy doing, then hire to fill in your deficiencies. Making the wrong hires early on can set your business back significantly. Too Much Time on the Product: Many incredible products never make it to market because founders spend too much time perfecting the product and not enough on the go-to-market strategy. Getting feedback from actual users is essential to refining your product and achieving success. Avoid these common pitfalls to set your startup on the path to growth and success. Focus, hire wisely, and balance product development with market feedback.

Hiring is hard enough, but for early-stage startups you have be prepared to pay well and often give up more equity than you want to. Shortchanging strong candidates on money and potential upside isn’t going to get it done. 3 options for early-stage startups to build their technical team: 1) Offer more comp (salary + equity) 2) Hire less experienced but motivated devs 3) Talk with us about how we build nearshore engineering teams for early-stage startups => save on payroll and keep your equity

It's the "give away your legos" moment that Molly Graham named. Hiring a new function inside your startup, like bringing in the first Product Manager, is just plain uncomfy for the existing team. It can feel like your agency is being taken away, like your impact is suddenly constrained. In this week's Ops Drops, I talk to Hello Generalist member David Horvath about this exact moment. He was the first PM inside HackerOne, and lived it first hand. David shares his lessons here, citing 4 big takeaways on how to ramp into a startup as an early hire. Hear more from David in this week's issue — link in the comments 👇

🚀 Ready to launch your startup dream team? Learn how to build a stellar crew step-by-step! From identifying key positions to navigating the hiring process, we've got your back. Let's turn your vision into reality! 💡💼 #StartupSuccess #DreamTeam #EntrepreneurshipJourney #Peopleinbox

One of the hardest and must important task for a founder is to build his core team. There should be a larger incentive than money for your first 5 hires. Your founding team members. These are the people that's gonna help you realise your dreams because their dreams align with yours. Be patient while hiring your core team. Culture makes or breaks a startup. Especially in early stages.

When to start hiring as a #founder... Disclaimer: I don't really know the answers here. Lots of founders have 100X more experience #scaling from garage to IPO. I don't. But I've been deeply *feeling* something for weeks and it feels worth airing out. At my first startup, we spent a lot of time chasing our tails. The product was always under more-features-needed duress. Which meant that I spent a lot of time just putting out fires. It meant that sales meetings went well, but closing deals was challenging. It also meant that we never had more than 4 full-time people. Because there wasn't enough of any function to do to warrant another hire dedicated to [FUNCTION]. Now, at Air Traffic Control — Grow Pipeline With Existing Content, we're faced with the most phenomenal need to hire. Our customer count is FLYING. So many thoughtful use cases. Great questions. We need more support materials for them and we're creating that. I spend a lot of time on customer calls. I learn something in every single one. We record them. Then line them up to translate those calls into support materials. And there's now enough of that work to require a full-time CS leader. Same for partnerships. Same for RevOps/MarketingOps. And our product roadmap is INSANELY exciting (I love what we do today and our rapid growth says we're right to feel incredible re what we've built, but if you saw where we're headed you might faint). And the only thing holding us back there is human bandwidth. Our devs are WORLD CLASS and chugging on all cylinders. So... ...we need more people. The balancing act is getting those people before anyone gets too stressed for too long *without* putting our capital runway at risk. And it's the first time as a founder I've ever been in a position to raise to *grow* as opposed to raising to *survive.* It is... a lot. And I'm so impossibly thrilled it's where we are. What's wild is where we'll be once the team fills out just a bit more. Being kept up at night thinking about how to fund and find our new crew members is actually a joy. It's just one I'm learning along the way. Thankful for advisors, friends, and our current small but mighty crew that they know what needs to be done and can help us chart a course. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far... go together. If you want to go really far and really fast, go with insanely smart people. :-)

In the three years since we started Every, not a single employee has voluntarily left the company. (Except for one, but he is coming back) One reason is that when I hire people I ask them what their motivation for coming to work at an early stage company is. If the conversation immediately turns to compensation and potential stock upside, it is almost always going to be a bad fit. In the early days of a startup, the financial position can be a roller coaster and those people will often get off the ride early. When you hire someone that is motivated by building for the sake of building, and by the desire to bring something awesome into the world, you know they will be in it for all the twists, turns and loop-de-loops. This changes when you are Series A onwards, so I wouldn’t apply this unless you are at the seed stage.

Every person has strengths and weaknesses in their career. It's powerful to know them, and lean harder into them when we pitch ourselves. For my co-founder and I, we are "passionate, ambitious, young product builders". We are not "highly experienced managers who have built and scaled two companies". So when we get on calls with investors, that's how we showcase ourselves. We talk about our passion for building consumer products, we talk about what drives us as founders, and how we often work 10+ hours a day through meals, in the doctor's waiting room, and holidays. That doesn't attract everyone. Some investors are specifically looking for those second-time founders who are 40+ years old. Other investors were just like us when they started their first company. Just like dating, we don't have to attract everyone. By trying to attract everyone, a person attracts no one. It's better to be polarizing.

Q: What kind of open source founders usually work with me on positioning? A: Second-time founders. A serious trend I've noticed in the type of founders who work with me is that they're usually (though not always) second-time founders, and they are usually over 35. It's not necessarily their second VC-backed company, or their second product company -- but the type of people who tend to hire me are those who've built a company (successfully or not) before. When it's not your first rodeo, you tend to value strategy more. You tend to value positioning more. 🤔 --