We’re halfway through our series on hiring, so thanks for joining us! In part 10, we’ll dive into the specifics of Gem’s founding team and how we personally recruited them.
As you can imagine, we used Gem to hire most of our founding team in some capacity. Source of primary relationships, introduction, Look for secondary connections Use powerful connector nodes.
Below is our founding team of eight talented people who joined us between Seed and Series A (in rough order):
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Drew Redzicky — Founding Engineer, First Year, Classmate at MIT.
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Jet Joe — Founding Engineer, First Year, Classmate at MIT.
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Jacob Hurwitz — Founding Engineer, 1st Class, Dropbox, former colleague.
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Alex Rubin — Founding Engineer, Level 1, Former Colleague at Dropbox, Referrer Jacob Hurwitz.
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Joe Totten — Founding the sales team (first VP Sales), second John Jarshin (Gem’s Advisor)
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Einas Haddad — Founding Engineer, 2nd Time Neha Batra (Classmate at MIT).
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Mike Pinkowish — Founding Engineer (first Head of Engineering), first degree, former Facebook colleague.
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Dan Cohen — Founding sales team, 1st round, introducer Joe Totten.
A few things to notice:
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Our team is almost entirely made up of first-degree contacts from places like MIT, Facebook, and Dropbox.
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Our founding team is incredibly talented and experienced.
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Our founding team helped us grow our ARR from $100,000 to $1 million in less than a year, and without them we wouldn’t be here today.
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By hiring great people, we were able to hire even more great people (we see multiple referrals within the founding team).
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We hired a great founding team and tripled our team the following year, then tripled again the year after that.
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Second-degree connected people were connected to us through powerful connector nodes.
It may not be immediately obvious, but we spent thousands of hours talking to hundreds of candidates from our network and still couldn’t hire them. Some weren’t the right fit. But most didn’t want to join our little startup. That’s why we took the time to Developing passive talent from networks is important.
Next
in Part 11So how do you approach that first “sales” conversation? In other words, how do you pitch the opportunity to the candidate? Before you get to mastering the talent development and interview process, it’s important to understand the basics of selling and closing a candidate, because you need to sell throughout the entire hiring process, not just at the end.
Meanwhile…
