Hiring for a Startup When You Can't Outpay Big Tech

Hiring is one of the hardest parts of building a startup, and it gets harder the better the people you want are.

At a startup, you are almost always competing against big tech for the same talent. You can’t match their compensation. You sometimes lose people to them anyway. And you have to keep a team motivated while you fight through the trenches, where the battles and the longer wars can feel relentless. None of that goes away. But over the years I’ve learned that the constraint forces you to get better at the parts of hiring that actually matter, and to look for talent in places most companies never bother to check.

I’ve split what has worked for me into two parts:

1. Who to Hire — the signals I look for: a track record of beating the odds, how people work when no one is grading them, and a genuine passion to build.
2. Where to Find Talent — the places most companies rarely look: referrals, tech talks, layoffs, open source, hackathons, and professors.

You will not win the compensation war against big tech, and you don’t have to. What you can do is hire for grit over polish, pay attention to how people behave when no one is grading them, and build a network so strong that the right people come to you.

I have found that the people who join a startup for reasons other than the biggest paycheck tend to be exactly the ones you want when the work gets hard. The constraint forces you to look for them, and looking for them is what makes the team great.