How To Recruit The Best Engineers And Sales Reps

**Harj Taggar** (0:00)
Today, we're gonna hear from David Paffenholz, co-founder and CEO of Juicebox, about how to source great engineering and sales talents. Juicebox is an AI sourcing platform backed by Sequoia and used by Ramp, Cursor and Perplexity to recruit the best talent in the world. First, we'll hear his presentation, and then we'll have a conversation to dig deeper into some of his advice for recruiting.

**David Paffenholz** (0:28)
Hey everyone, I'm David, co-founder of Juicebox. Today, we're talking about how to source and hire your first few engineers and AEs. Especially as a startup, you're probably thinking about a bunch of different things. Getting your next few thousand dollars in MRR, hiring and shipping new product features. It can be easy to not focus on the specific people you're bringing on, and really prioritizing speed instead. Speed is really good, but at the same time, there's a lot of reasons your first few hires matter a ton. You're gonna be defining the culture, velocity, and future of your business. That talent in the early days is shaping that for everyone who follows. Your future hires are gonna be looking up to your founding engineer, your founding AE, and perhaps even more importantly, you will be shaping them and they will be shaping how you run your business too. Now, making that even clearer, the culture is defined by the first 10 people in the company, and perhaps the next 40 people after that for the first 50 people total. Today, Juicebox is a team of 20 We put a lot of thought into who the first 10 people were we hire, and just as much thought into the next 10 as well. At the same time, hiring is really hard and really competitive. We put a screenshot here from an engineer where you can see the amount of outbound that they will receive. If you're an engineer yourself, you might have received the same LinkedIn DMs, emails and more. And so, as you're thinking about you recruiting other talent, keep in mind that they're receiving a lot of outbound themselves, and we'll need to make sure that your message and your outreach stands out. So, what really matters when thinking about where talent goes? First, we should think about the options that they have and how they're probably evaluating joining your company versus joining another company. We think of that in three main buckets. The first one is Big Tech. Fan companies, as we might imagine, strong compensation packages and a very stable job. At the same time, the pace will probably be slower and the impact that those people are having in those roles is less. We can contrast that with growth stage companies. And so a few logos on the slide are kind of later stage or large stage growth companies, Stripe, OpenAI and Anthropic. But really most Series B and onwards companies are going to fit into this category. What matters most here is that the compensation has pretty predictable upside. Their stock is likely not going to go to zero and they can estimate how much they'll be making in future years as the company continues to grow. And they're probably already starting at a pretty good base salary as well. At the same time, their work is somewhat fast paced and they still feel like they're making somewhat of an impact. At the same time, there's a lot of structure in place. There might be multi-layer orgs, they're definitely not working with the founders directly and they have less ownership about the work that they actually do. Now we'll think about your startup or where you probably are right now. The reason for an early hire to join is to be able to shape the culture, the product and the trajectory. They also have the highest variance in potential outcome on the economics of your stock. They're going to receive the largest equity grants in your company, but they're also the most likely to go to zero at that point. And so in some ways, the risk that an early employee is taking on is somewhat similar to the risk that a founder takes on. We'll go through different ways to minimize that risk and sell being at an early stage company in the best way possible. So as we think about what candidates we're bringing on and hiring, we'll want to make sure that we understand which of those three groups are they leaning towards. Most talent will already have an inclination one way or another. We might be able to tell based on the companies that they recently worked out or currently work at, or even what they tell us on the interview. When we're speaking to candidates, the first thing we want to find out is, do they have a leaning in one of those three directions? If yes, why? Which of those things matter to them? And how can we use that to our advantage to convince them to join our company? Now, as we continue the process with them, we'll want to make sure that they're staying true to their word. Are they also interviewing with a Big Tech company? If so, that might indicate that they're not quite sure in which direction they want to go yet, and we'll have to circle back to selling on why should they be joining a startup in the first place. Now, once we've figured out that they want to be joining a startup, we'll have to go to the second question, which is, why should they choose your startup? We've already established that they probably want to have high impact. They're open to pretty high risk, and they want to have the ownership of being able to work directly on important features, working with the founder directly, and really being able to influence that trajectory. Now, those things can happen at a lot of different startups. And let's say an early engineer is speaking with your company, they're likely also going to be speaking with other companies, maybe even other companies in your batch. And so next, we should think about why they should work at your startup. This is really unique to you. There's a few guiding points on here that we've often seen be a main selling point. One of them is being mission driven. For example, if you're working in an industry that has a specific connection to certain people, let's say you're doing a fintech that addresses international bank accounts, or you're working on an immigration startup, there might be people that are more driven to that mission and really want to contribute. Other candidates might be more focused on equity and compensation upside. They view this as a chance to have a really high variance outcome. And there, we might want to focus more on what the potential upside is, even provide a stock calculator for where they might want to go in the future. In other cases, you might have a really interesting problem space. This could be deep tech, things that are really technically big challenges, and will attract a certain pool of people who want to work on those deep challenges. And then finally, and I think this is often missed, is many people join companies because of the culture and the team, especially referrals. They already know people who are working at that business and have a reason to be a part of it. As you pitch your company, you should make sure that you know which of those four you're pitching, probably pitching one or two of them, and they might also vary depending on the candidate that you're speaking to. Now that we have some of the initial things in place, let's think about the sources that we have for finding those candidates. There's three main ones that we're going to cover at a high level, and then we're really going to dive into the sourcing part, because that's what's most under your control.