Finding & Poaching Our First Employee

In 2008, after over a year of bootstrapping our business, we were still only the original founders working in the startup. By that point, we needed to build a website to sell our software.

None of the founders were interested in developing an ecommerce website. For the founders, that kind of development work was not nearly as exciting as parallel computing. So we needed to find someone to build a simple ecommerce site for our business.

As a bootstrapped company, we had very little money. We did not need a full-time person. We needed a part-time person with sufficient skills to implement the ecommerce site. We also wanted someone local that could work in our office so that we could monitor progress and provide quick iterative feedback (which is not possible in remote development or off-shore development situations).

We had no idea how to find such a person.

As I was mulling over this hiring dilemma in my mind, I walked into Ginstar in Atlanta to buy a computer. As I was talking with the salesperson, I noticed a young student developing the Ginstar website behind the desk. I thought he looked exactly like the scrappy type of website developer that we needed. I told him I was a student at Georgia Tech too and just asked him questions about what he was doing. I was impressed that he was building a site that could handle tons of SKUs. While aesthetically this site was terrible, I could tell that his ecommerce coding was solid.

Since the owner of the store was standing right there, I could not talk well with him, so I planned to come back another day. I did. I think I came back several times trying to find a day when he would be present. Ultimately I found him and was able to slip him a note that read something like:  “We do cutting edge GPU computing. We’re Georgia Tech students too. Whatever they are paying you, we’ll pay $2/hr more. Call me.”

He called and we hired him. Seven years later he is still working part-time to help out our efforts, and it’s been a wonderful ongoing working relationship.

How did you find your first startup employee?