1/ Pro Tip: Best way to find a job at a startup…

Hint: it doesn’t start with a job board…

a thread

2/ Go to @crunchbase and set up a filter for the following:

1. Amount raised: $5M - $10M
2. Announced on: today - 3 days ago
3. Headquarters location: your preference
4. Investor Name: @Accel, @Greycroftvc, @Sequoia, @a16z etc...

It should look something like this.
3/ When a company raises money… they are going to use the capital to build out their team.

It isn’t rocket science!
4/ When successful venture firms with track records like, @Accel, @Greycroftvc, @Sequoia, @a16z sink money into a startup. Their chance of success increases astronomically.
5/ Filtering for recent fundraising allows you to get a pulse for when a company is going to add positions to their job board (if they haven’t already)
6/ If you see a company that piques your interest here is your order of operations:

1. Check for any job postings that meet your criteria. (If there isn’t a job listing for you now… it’s all good).
2. Linkedin, do you have a 1st degree connection to the company?

cont'd
7/

3. Linkedin pt 2, go to the companies Linkedin page and look at the People tab.

Do you have any strong 2nd degree connections to any investors or employees that work at the company?

If yes, ask your connection if they feel comfortable introducing you.

cont'd
/8

4. 4. If step 1 - 3 fail, there is still a glimmer of hope. This is step 4 because I consider it 4th down… and longgg.

Find one of the founders on Linkedin and send them a note congratulating them on the recent fundraising.
/9 Mention you have been following the company and you are interested in learning more about open opportunities.

Why does this work for small seed - series A startups?

A few reasons…
/10

1. When you’re the founder of a small startup… praise does not come often. When someone from the outside world recognizes your accomplishments it feels good!

2. Hiring is fucking hard… believe it or not… Most startups don’t have an endless pipeline of candidates

cont'd
/11

Having someone interested in your product come inbound should hopefully constitute a conversation.

Also, I speak from experience… step 4 is how I convinced @jtdaugh to hire me for my role @LEX_Markets

A hail mary on 4th and long... but it worked!
The best part about this approach…

You can save your query and check it every morning. If there are no new funding events that day... don’t sweat it.

Check back tomorrow or expand your search by playing with the funding amount filter

More from Startups

There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

You May Also Like

1. Project 1742 (EcoHealth/DTRA)
Risks of bat-borne zoonotic diseases in Western Asia

Duration: 24/10/2018-23 /10/2019

Funding: $71,500
@dgaytandzhieva
https://t.co/680CdD8uug


2. Bat Virus Database
Access to the database is limited only to those scientists participating in our ‘Bats and Coronaviruses’ project
Our intention is to eventually open up this database to the larger scientific community
https://t.co/mPn7b9HM48


3. EcoHealth Alliance & DTRA Asking for Trouble
One Health research project focused on characterizing bat diversity, bat coronavirus diversity and the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in the region.
https://t.co/u6aUeWBGEN


4. Phelps, Olival, Epstein, Karesh - EcoHealth/DTRA


5, Methods and Expected Outcomes
(Unexpected Outcome = New Coronavirus Pandemic)