Startup
Why Humility is Essential for Every New Startup Hire
When interviewing product managers at Google, we ranked candidates on four metrics: technical ability, communication skills, intellect and Googliness. A Googley person embodies the values of the company – a willingness to help others, an upbeat attitude, a passion for the company, and the most important, humility.
In the past week, I asked two heads of engineering to identify the most important characteristic in new hires. Both responded, “humility”. For one startup ascertaining humility is so important, it is the first filter in the interview process.
Disruptive companies reinvent. They don’t copy and execute someone else’s playbook. To be disruptive, a startup’s team must cast aside preconceived notions and assumptions about doing things the “right way” and start inventing new ways.
TechMeetups presents #TechStartupJobs Fair London 2013
Original post by BEN HOROWITZ via pandodaily
Aww man, you sold your soul
Naww man, mad people was frontin’
Aww man, made something from nothing
- Kanye West, “New God Flow”
Your startup is going well, and as your business expands, you hear the dreaded words from someone on your board: “You need to hire some senior people. Some real ‘been there, done that’ executives to help you get the company to the next level.”
Really? Is now the time? If so, where do I begin? And once I get them, what do I do with them? And will I know if they are doing a good job?
The first question you might ask is, “Why do I need senior people at all? Won’t they just ruin the culture with their fancy clothes, political ambitions, and need to go home to see their families?” To some extent, the answer to all of those may be “yes,” which is why this question must be taken quite seriously. However, bringing in the right kind of experience at the right time can mean the difference between bankruptcy and glory.
Let’s go back to the first part of the question. Why hire a senior person? The short answer is time. As a technology startup, from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age. How would Facebook go if Zuckerberg started it last week? At Netscape, we went public when we were 15 months old. Had we started six months later, we would have been late to a market with 37 other browser companies. Even if nobody beats you to the punch, no matter how beautiful your dream, most employees will lose faith after the first five or six years of not achieving it. Hiring someone who has already done what you are trying to do can radically speed up your time to success.
Welcome to America. Startups, patent holders, and iPhone programmers, please come to the front of the line
Original post by Alex Salkever via Quartz
Immigration reform looks like it might really happen in US President Barack Obama’s second term. Many have tried before and failed; few ever attempted a total overhaul of a very broken system. But amid sudden political momentum, what if the laws governing foreigners’ rights to live and work on US shores could be rewritten? Who would get to stay? How tight should borders be? Which countries and industries benefit? Quartz has been asking lawyers, advocates, and business leaders what a sound migration policy in America would look like.
For the first time in recent memory, immigration reform in the US appears to be a political slam dunk. Republicans smarting from a poor showing among all minorities publicly acknowledge they need to embrace Latinos and Asians to win the White House. An emboldened Barack Obama is chafing to push forward comprehensive changes to the immigration policy. Much of the noise around this issue has focused on dealing with the millions of undocumented workers.
But perhaps a more pressing issue (as I and Vivek Wadhwa argue in our book, “The Immigrant Exodus”) is reforming skilled immigration rules to allow more high-powered aliens to start companies, work, do research, and remain in America. A 2011 study found that nearly half of the Top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had immigrants on the founding or top management teams. Another study estimated that 25% of publicly traded companies founded between 1990 and 2005, that had also received venture backing, had immigrant founders. A 2007 research project by Vivek Wadhwa and AnnaLee Saxenian found that 52% of science and technology companies in Silicon Valley, the global center of tech innovation, had at least one immigrant founder.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Original post by Jessica via The Sourcery
The recent plague of acqui-hires is making it seem like there’s no talent rock left un-turned in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. This 
simply isn’t the case.
Things may seem dire, but you don’t need to make an offer to every developer that you meet. If you’re a funded startup, there’s still hope! You just need to make recruiting a priority and to spend the time and effort learning how to do it correctly. Or, paysomeone to do it for you (wink).
- Market your career opportunities like they’re one of your products. It’s not just your SaaS software that needs to be talked up, but your open jobs need some love, too! Blog and tweet about your openings, write compelling copy, get visibility by sponsoring events, re-post your job openings, and keep your ads and website current.
- Work the network of your whole company. Ask your employees for referrals. Make it easy for them. You can create an actual referral blurb that they can send out or post to their LinkedIn profiles. Ask your VC’s and board members for referrals. If they can’t send you the engineers you need, ask for a referral to a trusted recruiterwho can help.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Original post by alyssaaldersley
As Noah Kagan recently put it so well: can I be real with you? Real real?
I’ve talked before about how I carve my day to squeeze every drip out of it. Shared my theories fortheming, a noble attempt to avoid
drift and push for maximum focus. Described how I try to be disciplined with my schedule, working in bursts across a 16 hour day.
What I talk much less about is why I hack my life in such ways. About my “other job”, as parent to two small people.
Surely I must be crazy to grip onto the rocket ship that is life at an early stage startup, while also trying to be equally successful in my role as parent, no?
Some days I think perhaps I am, that it can’t be done. Those thoughts creep in whenever I’m struggling to keep my two lives separate; determined not to let my small people affect my work, or my work affect my small people. All while looking to escape assumed judgement for being a parent in a young man’s world – a place where parenting feels rare.
Slowly I’m starting to swing around. Realising I might be able to have my cake and eat it; to pull off caring for my small people without compromising my commitment to the rocket ship.
Realising that rather than being about a fight for separation [and perhaps segregation] of my double life, perhaps it’s really about acceptance and blending them, openly and honestly, into one.
I’d like to talk here about the challenges I encounter as I try to pull it all off. I know how useful it will be to me, to work through the complexities of parenting while riding a rocket ship, and it would be amazing to receive comments from others in the same position. I hope by sharing, it’s also helpful to others too.
Life’s a balancing act, or is it?
There’s always a ton of talk about ‘work-life balance’. In its purest form, the name suggests each significant area of your life should be evenly balanced and equally weighted. Therefore, as soon as one aspect appears to be receiving more attention than another, you invariably begin to feel off balance and out of control. A recipe for two-way guilt and stress if ever I heard it!
More recently, the buzz words have shifted to ‘work-life merge’ and ‘integration’. As their names suggest, the focus is on acceptance of your whole self. Rather than living two separate lives, struggling to keep each under control without affecting the other, you act openly and deliver positively to both. The guilt that comes with living in ‘middle state’ is not good for anyone, least of all yourself. Trust me on that one.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Original post by Alexey Aylarov via ventureburn
Culturally, socially and historically, Silicon Valley and Moscow are worlds (or at least 5800 miles) apart. But in a small pocket of Moscow, a growing number of entrepreneurs – supported by a growing number of enthusiastic local venture capitalists – are beginning to make the Russian capital a key pushpin on the tech startup map.
The international success of these startups will ultimately dictate how the Russian high-tech community is viewed, but there is a raw (and at times admittedly naïve) passion for creating high tech that has begun to get Russia international attention. Being part of this tightly knit and communally supportive group of Moscow-based startups for the past three years, I’ve learned first hand – alongside my fellow entrepreneurs – just how challenging it can be. For many of us, the big question is: when and how should we expand into the United States market?
Our startup, which allows website visitors to place calls to companies through their browsers, couldn’t wait to launch in the United States. We knew that’s where the biggest customers would be, where our most tech-savvy users would be, where the best startup advisors would be, where the top venture capitalist firms set up shop. But we put all of that on hold and bunkered down to focus on the technology and on acquiring customers in our own hemisphere first. Like a game of Risk, gradual expansion was probably the best business decision Zingaya made in the first year of our startup.
Here are three reasons why debuting in your own country before launching in the United States might make sense:
1. Good developers can come cheap
We’ve since moved some operations to the United States, which includes hiring American staff. That’s feasible for us now, but early growth and software development might not have been possible if we weren’t able to hire Russian programmers for a more reasonable cost (for us, at least) than the market rate of similarly skilled developers in the U.S. Technical knowledge is increasingly rapidly in places like Eastern Europe, and the global gap between U.S. developers and those abroad has narrowed significantly.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Startup of the Week: InternAvenue
Original post by WIRED.co.uk
InternAvenue is an online recruitment tool that allows employers to access graduate interns in key business areas of interest. Companies can create a profile and search through prospective interns to find those candidates with the exact skills they are looking for, rather than posting a regular job ad. The company was founded by Oxford graduate and former lawyer, Dupsy Abiola. She recently appeared onDragon’s Den and secured £100,000 investment from Peter Jones. Wired.co.uk caught up with her.
Founder: Dupsy Abiola
Launched: September 2012
Employees: five
Funding: closing third round of angel investment
What problem do you solve?
Put simply, it is hard to just meet and hire the bright students and graduates you need without considerable investment of time and money. We believe businesses would benefit from direct access to the right types of candidates, right when they are needed.
How do you plan to make money?
Intern Avenue is free for students. We charge business a fixed fee for access. Other revenue streams are planned, but at present our focus is on providing our core value — reliable access to qualified and skilled applicants who can add value immediately upon hire.
What’s the biggest misconception about your business?
When you do something new, misconceptions are inevitable. I would not like people to mistake our platform for “just another niche job board”. Intern Avenue is a talent aggregator which operates like an on-demand introduction agency. We aim to support and enhance company hiring activities. We also help candidates by providing them with the ability to be headhunted and find accurate job market data in a space where this visibility is sorely lacking.
We’re excited to announce we’re holding our New York City, US Job Fair on November 29.
Find out more information by visting the NYC Jobfair page.
Original post by KAZIM LADIMEJI via Recruiter.com
We all know the situation: It’s been a tough search with limited quality candidates and you’ve got a severely under-staffed internal team. At last, you find a great candidate who fits the bill and loves the company, and every thing is going fine until at offer stage they drop the clanger that they want a starting salary that was much higher than budgeted! What do you do? As a hiring manager or recruiter, you have to do your best to negotiate with this candidate making sure that if any raise is granted it does not upset the internal pay hierarchy or else you could be facing discord and a spate of pay rise requests leading to unhealthy levels of internal inflation.
We know that this can be an awkward situation that most recruiters and hiring managers will face from time to time and below we have set out eight ways to help you handle this difficult situation.
1. Buy yourself time
Don’t feel pressured into giving an immediate answer to a candidate’s request for a higher-than-budget starting salary, irrespective of whether your answer is positive or negative. Tell the candidate that you will need time to discuss this with your colleagues and superiors; let he or she see that there are barriers, e.g. other people that need to be convinced. Plant a seed of doubt in their mind.
2. Ask the employee if they have any evidence to back up their claims
Ask a candidate, “Do have any evidence to back up your claims for a higher starting salary as your reward department will need to see this in order to even consider a case.” Defer some of the decision making to other parties not present, and put some hurdles in place, so the candidate can see that while you are open, it will not be an easy ride and he or she will need to justify their case. This approach may help to deter the ‘chancers’, but the more determined will keep on pushing.
Where the startup jobs are [infographic]
Original post by Aaron Lander via Pinterest
We’re delighted to announce we’re holding our second bi-annual Job fair this September in London
Original post by Jim Kerstetter via cnet
If you thought patents were intruding into the tech industry just a wee bit too much, brace yourself. Now they can be part of the recruiting process.
TalentBin, a San Francisco startup that scrapes social media sites ranging from Quora to Twitter in order to index hiring prospects for recruiters, has added the U.S. Office’s patent database to the sources it scours for information on prospective employees.
We’re delighted to announce we’re holding our second bi-annual Job fair this September in London
