Pop The Bubble on Early-Stage Startup HIring

I was on a business expert panel a few years ago speaking to an MBA class at a local university. The topic was startups and business impact, a topic I am very passionate about, so I was happy to be a participant on the panel and talking to the next generation of business leaders about the potential for businesses to change the world for the better. I was seated on the panel next to two startup chief executives, one of which was asked about hiring for startups, specifically how to hire the founding team, the leaders that will create the business from the ground up. The male executive next to me responded that startups “typically have to hire already very successful experienced tech employees or financially independent young men” to join their founding teams initially, because “those are the only people who can afford to take the market rate pay cut with equity options that early-stage startups provide in terms of compensation.” He went on to explain that women and older men with families and successful established careers were less likely to take the high risk of joining a new startup because they had more at stake in terms of losing family incomes and already established earning paths.

I managed (barely) to keep myself from jumping out of my seat next to him. I responded when he was finished with, “I’d like to challenge that assumption by saying this: there is a wide world of business out there. There are people out there today who are absolute superstars, working in places that you haven’t even considered. They’re working hard running non-profits, retail stores, teaching, providing healthcare, working in social work, doing all sorts of different work. There are people in each of these areas, and many more, that are absolutely brilliant leaders, intelligent strategists, fantastic teammates and individual contributors, and they are working for a salary every day that is much less than your founding team will be making. You haven’t even considered that to take a startup founding salary would be a pay INCREASE for some of them, with huge potential upside..and even if it isn’t, these smart people might want to pivot or take the risk to do something completely new to them, and your business might hugely benefit from the different perspectives that they bring to the table. We have GOT TO START being more creative about who we hire, there is a whole world full of fantastic candidates outside of the tech/startup hiring bubble.”

I was fired up, and the executive, of course, agreed with me, he obviously did not mean to offend or dismiss other types of candidates, but it was a reminder to me that tech/startups can be an insular bubble, used to the way of doing things that they have always done them, and that has typically favored a certain type of founder/early-stage startup hire. It is fairly obvious that we do ourselves a huge disservice when we only open our hiring pool to people who look or act like us, or make assumptions about who will be the right candidate for this job based on where they went to college, which startups they have already worked for, who they know in the VC world, what their financial status is, how old they are, and/or how much risk they’re potentially willing to take based on our own internal calculations. It seems cliché to say that diversity is the key to a successful business (it is, look it up, it’s a business success no-brainer to be as diverse as possible), but whew, sometimes it seems like our implicit biases, bubbles, and staid hiring processes stand in the way of all of that.

I’m biased about this topic, obviously, because I am a social worker who became a successful tech executive. I like to think my way of looking at the world from outside the tech bubble allowed the company that I worked for to thrive in the business we created to serve different types of employees and clients, who also saw the world from outside the tech bubble. I am incredibly grateful to those founders that I was given the opportunity to make that leap from one career to another and become part of a great founding team, and the space to prove that I also belonged there and could thrive and succeed in the startup environment. But deep down, I already knew when I was working every day as a social worker that I could excel in the startup world or any other, I had all the skills, instinct and talents I needed to be a great leader and executive, I just needed the opportunity to show that, and when I was given the opportunity, I did.

So, founders, leadership teams, hiring managers: when you’re building your founding team or your early-stage leadership team, please, please, please widen the aperture of your hiring lens, you’ll get to see things you never thought you could, and your business will be better for it!