This is Part 2 of Hiring for a Startup When You Can’t Outpay Big Tech. Part 1, on who to hire, is here.
This part applies whether you are at a startup or a large company, but it matters most when you cannot win on compensation alone. When you can’t pay what big tech pays, your network is the only reliable way to reach A players.
Referrals. This has been my single best source. I have consistently found that people will take a risk, work for less money, and take a leap of faith for someone they trust. It is worth investing in. Incentivize referrals with a larger than average bonus, and protect your team’s experience so your internal NPS stays high. A great net promoter score among your own people pays for itself many times over in who they bring with them.
Tech talks and podcasts. When you come across a great podcast guest, invite them to give a tech talk. People almost always enjoy sharing what they know, and it gives you a natural way to share what you are building. It is a quiet, low-pressure form of hiring. For me, the most relevant show over the last seven years has been Flirting with Models. Even when a guest isn’t looking to make a move themselves, they usually know many other people working in the same domain.
Big tech layoffs. When large adtech organizations went through layoffs, places like Amazon’s Twitch and Meta’s adtech teams, they became some of the best places for us to find genuinely strong ML researchers and data engineers. Talented people suddenly become available through no fault of their own, and a startup that moves quickly can do very well here.
Open source and competitions. Contributors to the repositories you depend on are a great pool, for example foundational time series models, as are people who do well in Kaggle competitions. Their work is public, which means you can evaluate real output before you ever talk to them.
Hackathons. Go to hackathons, or better, sponsor one. In a single weekend you get to watch how people scope a problem, handle pressure, and ship something real with a team they just met — signal you can’t get from any resume or interview loop. The people who show up are self-selecting for exactly the builder mentality a startup needs, and the ones who stay until the demo at 2 a.m. are the ones you want in the foxhole.
Professors. Ask professors in your domain for a list of their strong students. Faculty often have a clear read on who is exceptional, and they are usually happy to point you toward people who are about to enter the market.
Previously: Who to Hire — the signals that predict who will thrive at a startup.