“Stop competing for the résumé everyone already agrees on. Peter Thiel taught me that at PayPal in 2002: we built the early team from Stanford and Illinois networks because incumbents couldn't assess those people.”

“The hires nobody else has noticed are usually one introduction away from someone you already trust. At Sequoia, around 60% of our early hires came straight from the network, not from job boards or recruiters. I’d spend my energy mapping the relationships your founders, investors, and first customers already have, then ask for warm intros to the people they’d actually want to work with again.”

“I look for people who are already doing the job somewhere else, just not with that title yet: the engineer running a side project with users, the ops person holding a broken company together, the founder whose startup didn't work. The best early hire I made was someone no recruiter would have surfaced because their resume looked weird.”

“I still interview eight to ten people a week, and the best founders I know sell the mission before they ever assess skills. Nobody joins an unknown startup for the salary; they join because they believe the problem matters and they will own a real piece of it.”

“I don't think the best early hires are hidden; I think most founders haven't decided what great actually means for the role, so they can't spot it.”

“I look for people who have already done the thing I need in a messier version of my world, not the polished version at a bigger company. When I hired our founding AE, 450 applications came in two days, and almost none of them were ready to sell without a brand, budget, or team behind them. The ones who stood out had built something from zero before, even if it was small and ugly.”

“The best early hires we find for Coastal clients usually aren't on LinkedIn at all. We spend our time in niche technical communities, Discord groups, and referral chains where the top 1% of engineers actually hang out. The real unlock is building trust with those communities before you need them, because by the time a candidate is actively looking, every other founder is already in their inbox.”

“The best early hires I found were rarely the ones actively interviewing, and almost never the ones every other startup was chasing. At Facebook and Pinterest I learned that the overlooked people often had unconventional paths: self-taught engineers, open-source contributors, or folks leaving big companies for a smaller stage but without the polished resume.”

“At Weights & Biases I built outbound sourcing from zero and kept cost per hire under $5,000, because the best early hires are rarely the ones applying; they are the ones a good sourcer finds and a founder convinces.”