There are many things I like about Silicon Valley. The things that need work though, is that it chases the shiny new thing faster than the fashion industry. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but its the me-too”ness” that bugs you after a while. Kinda like Bollywood.

Take storytelling for instance. Every incubator and startup now has a “storyline” that they adhere to. Similar to Bollywood.

The Bollywood stories are boy-meets-girl variety garden romance, or the 5 different variations of someone’s been wronged.

Silicon Valley now has their “storyline” – “I was doing <something inane> and I faced <this really silly problem> so I decided to build <this toy> because I am passionate about <something they really are not passionate about>.

Take this from ex Admob founder Omar

“The idea originated when my wife was shopping for a coffee table. She spent of bunch of time browsing the web, collecting her options in a gmail draft, and then sent me an email of blue links that I was supposed to click on one by one to form an opinion. By the time I got to the fourth one, I had forgotten what the first one looked like, what the prices of any of them were, and certainly had not checked reviews or anything else that would help me give her a more informed opinion. At the same time, my family was planning a vacation with a group of friends, and all of our decisions from hotels, to activities, to areas to visit, were all being made in roughly the same way.”

The pez dispenser story is so 1999 was my thinking, but every startup’s got the same story going. Scratch your own itch is what its called.

Here’s another one from Pair

We had a problem. We had just moved to Mountain View, but our girlfriends were still in Canada. We tried using text message, and Facebook to stay in touch, but we really felt like there should be a better way to stay in touch with our partners. We realized that we were sending over 90% of our messages to a single person using tools that were designed to send messages to everyone you know. There didn’t seem to be a better way. So we made one 🙂

There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but its very cliche and sounds construed and fake.

What’s your take? Is it lame or does it really “make the company more human and personable”?

How do you figure out which events matter and which dont in your startup?

Some events in your startup journey are obviously huge. First version of product shipped. First customer payment. First hire. First funding (maybe). Others are more innocuous. They slide by many times without any fanfare. Like the first time a customer logs a complaint. There are many cynics who might say

“Yes, because if every second of your <startup> life isn’t documented then it doesn’t really exist, right?”

Yet those same cynics might not understand that most entrepreneurs dont know which seconds are important and which ones are not. Most of these are better evaluated in hindsight.

What if you could “record” your startup’s seconds? Automatically?

You actually can, if you use the Cloud – since everything in on the cloud its easy to record.

What’s needed is a “black box flight recorder for startups“.

It helps you “login” to all your cloud services and automatically categorizes these events into buckets.

Then it helps your figure out what triggers something.

It can be a huge help for incubators.

It could also help create a framework for decision making.

So, please – build one already.

There are 2 interesting links today that are worth reading. One from Pando daily says Angel List is helping match 600+ potential hires to startup companies each week. That’s a huge number.

“Rather than operating like a normal job board, it matches people who failed to raise money or whose startup didn’t work out with companies that have yet to raise money.”

Second, an article on LinkedIn about how recruiters now use LinkedIn as their primary sourcing tool.

“LinkedIn enjoys a vast sweet spot between those two extremes, helping fill high-skill jobs that pay anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000 or more a year.”

Search agencies now get less than 2% of Adobe’s business in the Americas. (Compared to 20%)

I love it. Larger companies are going to LinkedIn to bypass recruiters and smaller companies are being introduced by more effective job boards. Granted this wont work for 100% of the companies, but it will work for 80% of a certain type of roles.

So what happens to the traditional recruiter?

The same thing that SaaS did to enterprise sales people. The quality sales people who built relationships will be enormously successful. The mediocre ones will be relegated to a inside sales position with vastly different jobs. They will focus on nurturing their prospective employees instead of spamming them with job descriptions.

Hiring for startups will never be the same again for sure.

Early this year we needed to hire good engineering talent for our new startup. Unlike larger Indian companies who hire by the thousands and train by the hundreds we needed 3 people. A lead developer (backend: python, php or Ruby), a front end engineer (Javascript mostly) and a junior backend and database developer.

I had a 3 month goal for 3 people. I also decided not to hire any recruiters (I had used recruiters before), not for the money, but I had been warned about perverse incentives, aggressive, pushy people who try to close on sub-par candidates and poaching of your existing staff. A story that I learned about (turned out to be true), was that a recruiter was helping a company hire 2 developers and after those 2 were hired, the hiring team of 3 folks were placed by the recruiter in another company within 3 months.

I started at earnest looking primarily for people in my network. I have a reasonably large network in the entrepreneur community and was convinced by many that it was the best way to hire developers. I also avoided hiring from larger Indian companies (for developers) since many of them dont enjoy startups after they learn about the longer hours and pressures of shipping product.

This is not a blot against the individuals, but more the reality that many of these large companies have a very low bar set by their customers. Product release cycles for most IT organizations (that outsource work to India) ranges from 6-9 months. Multiple conference calls to “nail down requirements”, a process which takes 3 months, are normal.

The “network” included emails, twitter & facebook posts and linkedin status updates with the job description, the perks of the role and our company’s culture. A week later I got 3 resumes, and none of them were even a close fit.

I did get spam messages from Sutralite, Naurki and a freelance recruiter.

Plan B was to attend many developer events and network to meet qualified candidates. I got more people pitching me to invest in their company than possible candidates. I attended 3 events and the total number of people at those events was close to 300+.

Plan C was to post the job on some technical, developer friendly forums. I started with hasgeek. I have been a fan of their events and a couple of entrepreneurs mentioned their job board as a good one, so I posted my first job description.

I was fairly pleased with the results. I got 11 resumes in total, 7 were good quality and fit the JD reasonably well, 1 was over qualified (and expensive), and 3 were not a fit.

I did get a spam message from Sutralite again.

Plan D was to post on Pluggd.in. It was not a featured job listing. I got 1 resume for a totally unrelated position (marketing) that we were not hiring for.

I did get a spam message from Sutralite again. Different person. I emailed back and asked the individual to stop spamming me. Got no response back.

I also got another resume from a person who was a recruiter for a mid-sized company offering to “help” me recruit from her database for a “fee”. She claimed to have access to a large database of good quality developers (obviously rejects from that company’s database). She did not send me her email from her company ID, but a simple google search revealed who she was.

What I learned:

1. Recruiting from your network is hit or miss. If you need to hire a specific set of people by a particular time, there’s no choice but to spend money either to buy a database, hire a recruiter or to pay a lot of money for referring candidates. The other approach is to pay-it-forward. Build your networks way before you need them.

2. There are a lot of startups that claim that they exclusively hire from their network. Many also claim they “attract” very high quality candidates because of their unique culture or work environment. I have visited those companies and met their people. I did not find anything different or unique and also found that most people hired there were recruited by consultants. Dont believe that myth.

3. If you are a startup and you dont have an aggressive hiring strategy – which includes spending money on multiple means to recruit, then dont plan on scaling or growing fast. There’s value in growing slow and steady, so your culture assimilates everyone, giving room for hiring mistakes.

Next post – how to word that job description so you can increase your chances of success.

Related post & ht to Elaine for triggering the thought – The recruiter honeypot.

There are two types of decisions – big life altering ones and innocuous ones. The tough part is I dont know which decisions fall into either category. Like Steve Jobs said, you can only connect the dots in hindsight. The amazing part is these decisions are to be taken in every aspect of your startup – engineering, marketing, sales, finance etc.

Let me give some examples:

For BuzzGain, I had a good friend recommend a lawyer who he had worked with. Jim (Cooley) was a smart, very well connected and personable individual. Daniel and he helped me put together our initial structure, complete my 83B election. Being a tech and a sales guy I did not care too much about the 83B election. I was loathe to spend too much money speaking to Jim and Daniel (they are good, but charge by the hour) so I dismissed the paperwork as needless “waste of time”. 3 days after sending me the paperwork, Daniel called me to remind me to send it in. There was a decision I had to make – spend a few thousand dollars today or punt to a later day. Since I was bootstrapping, I was inclined to punt. A couple of days later, Daniels’ paralegal called me and reminded me again to file the paperwork. I did it and it turned out to be the best decision I made on exit.

When our alpha version was out in Sep, I had 15 pre-release customers who were trying out the initial version. The feedback from most was to continue to build the initial database of key reporters and bloggers with a focus on specific markets. I.e. to continue on our original vision and value proposition. Paul though was the only person with an alternative opinion. He asked me to look at his most recent blog posts and compare them to his posts from 6 months before. His focus had dramatically changed from finding and building blogger relationships to engaging on social media. He mentioned that although it would be a dramatic change in our product, it was where things were headed. The decision was rather scary at that point – continue down our path (based on 14 folks feedback) or change course (based on 1 person’s feedback). We chose the latter. Again, the best decision I have ever made.

Now, these decisions were not made in a vacuum. Both alternatives to the decisions had a ton of pros and cons. I needed to build a framework to think about how to think.

My first piece of learning was its always better to see the options and decision criteria in writing. Somehow I have found that writing it in paper (or on your computer) and hence being able to see it (with your eyes) brings a level of clarity that doing it in your mind (hence being unable to see it) does not.

My second piece of learning was that my framework was a tree. The depth of the tree would be the level that was needed to get to two states – Worst case situation and Best case situation. The rest were if-then-else statements.

The third part of my learning was to map out how to undo my decision if I figured out later I had made the wrong decision. If I spent as much time figuring out how to recover from a bad decision as opposed feeling good about a well made decision, I’d be okay.

Try it out. Let me know if it works. If you have learned something else, drop me a note.