The founder's journey, highlighting challenges like investor rejections, near homelessness, and a viral campaign, ultimately focusing.
The founder's journey, highlighting challenges like investor rejections, near homelessness, and a viral campaign, ultimately focusing on the mindset and experiences of a startup founder.
The way that you guys think about team is in a very non-traditional way and that's the way that you also have faith that our business development and things like that. When you are coming out of YC and you're a a hot company, you have the privilege of picking the best engineers um on the planet if you want. Look at the upside of our equity, you can pull from Stanford, from Harvard, from Google, from, you know, uh wherever you want. When you're in the bottom 10% of YC like we were, you cannot do that. You have to get more creative about who you hire. And so for us, um our first engineer, actually his name uh I'm not going to say his name, but he came from a a Taco Bell. Uh we actually found him because his GitHub, he had been doing some work on voice AI, and we had a meeting with him and he explained to us that his background was he had worked on a factory floor, and then he had worked as
the manager of a Taco Bell, and then he had figured out how to get an IT job by teaching himself how to code, which is where he had been for like 3 months when we met him. And uh the thing that we noticed though was that we had never met a person who lit up more about shipping, building things, building really cool things. Um and that energy carried forward. Then our next hire was a marketing hire who had dropped out of the University of Arizona. Um and then we hired a student who was on an internship from NUS, the Singapore university. And essentially we started building this team of people who did not have this prestige and background, but were really scrappy and young and hustling. And to this day, um what we focus on is we love hiring really young, hard-working, ambitious people who don't have credentials. And so my my favorite example of this is our business development team, which
is an entry-level job. We will hire just about anybody who is ready to show up and work hard. And since we began our BDR program, we've had uh I think like 20% of them become forward-deployed engineers, the other 10% become in marketing, 20% moved to uh account executives, some into revops, some into operations, finance. We've had basically this pool of young ambitious people that we say, "Come in, work really hard for 6 months, and then come back and let's figure out where you're going to fit in this organization." And it's worked amazing.