This is going to be the longest post yet. It's my own experience of finding technical talent to build beta Morph, my start up, and it was not an easy journey. Here's how it happened...
You hear it all the time. The perfect combo of entrepreneurs is business savvy linked with the tech genius. Ballmer and Gates, Jobs and Woz, Thiel and Levchin, Adriel and ____. I needed someone, I was convinced, as dedicated as myself, and loads smarter and more talented. Someone I would get along with, someone who would be my friend, someone who would contradict me and be more creative than me, someone who would push me and help me drag this business forward into the success I was confident it can have.
But where do I start looking? What kind of person do I look for? What can I offer them, or do for them, or inspire them with to convince them of Morph's potential value. How do I get someone to build out Morph, and be committed to the project on the same level I was?
I first went to Chris Mumford, my adviser, and someone who has watched Morph develop from pizza delivery app idea to current form. He was excited that we had come this far. He had a simple solution: what I want is to outsource a project like this. Plenty of talent out in India would be capable of building this out quickly and cheaply. All I would need to do is provide wire frames to help guide the project, because they build what I want, to the t. If I want a square but draw a rectangle, I can undoubtedly expect to get someone longer than it is wide, even if it makes no sense.
Prashant, Chris' man in India, and I began speaking right away. Over Skype sessions, we discussed a timeline (we wanted to try to have a beta test in April. Oh, how silly we were), pricing ($10,000? I estimated 50K on my pro forma, so not too bad), and wire frames (what we had would do just fine. Thank you to proto.io and, of course, to May!).
But slowly, problems arose. He wouldn't answer email for 4 days at a time. He would be 20 minutes late to Skype calls. His internet would go out. He would miss calls, and email me 2 days later with an apology. We just weren't on the same page. My primary expectations of having someone dedicated, and someone I can get along with seemed so far removed from reality.This project that was supposed to be a fun, though challenging experience, was becoming little more than a headache.
I had to make a decision between continuing on this path that was recommended to me by an accomplished professor and entrepreneur in his own right, someone who was a dedicated adviser, and pursuing a trickier choice. The choice wasn't a hard one. I'm in this for the fun- the challenges should not, and should never be, personnel. I thanked Prashant for his time, and moved on.
It was about 8 weeks from our first conversation to our last. 8 weeks of lost time. Where do I go from here? What other options are available? I knew I wanted to launch on September, the start of the new school year. This all had to be built out quickly, and I had no idea where to go.
My first step was research through my network. I reached out to Nick Jordan, CEO of Smashing Boxes. Nick is a successful non-technical founder of a very technical company. Almost everyone working at SB is a coder or designer of some sort. Confident he would had something to say, I reached out.
Reaching out to people with a selfish question like "Please help me with all of my problems, and in return I'll send you more emails later when I have bigger problems" can be tricky. My strategy usually revolves around getting an introduction from a mutual contact, and getting right to the point. Important people have matters much more important than reading your non-important email, no matter how important you find your matter to be.
Also, avoid asking for a meeting every time. There is so much that can be done through 1-2 emails that a meeting or a call would just be a waste of everyone's time. Great blog by the Harvard Business Review covers that further for y'all.
He came back with a dozen articles all about what "technology people" expect, where to find them, what to do. Some were positive- saying that showing enough excitement for a scaleable idea can get any CTO on board. Some were action-supportive, telling the business guy to just go learn to code to build it himself and not waste time and energy in a potentially fruitless search. And another straight up said to not bother, because "tech people" hate being called "tech people" and looking for someone to build your idea is just plain rude.
So over all, more questions then answers.
I spoke to other young entrepreneurs who I know had hired tech partners. I read articles, asked professors, and made that one of my biggest questions to any adviser or accomplished entrepreneur or I ever met with. It was on my mind all the time, and I was nervous, all the time. I joined LinkedIn premium to use their Recruiter feature, with no success. Contacting a dozen people with coding skills, under the age of 35 and based in the south-east led to 11 no-answers, and one guy who wrote simply, "You seem to have no idea what you're asking for."
I joined websites that intended to set up business and technology founders with similar success.
I asked everyone I met with for their advice and experience. "Go to meetups and pitch your idea." "You need a 40 year old manager type." "You won't find anyone on this coast." "No one from the west coast would want this." "Ignore the tech guy, get venture funding first".
All of this advice was thrown at me, and all served to confuse me more. I reached out to dozens of college grads, with no success. Time to focus on getting a younger recruit. I met with a UNC computer science student, Jesse Osiecki, to get his opinion on the project, and some information about the next steps I should take. Per his recommendation, I reached out to 4 professors in the UNC computer science department (Jesse recommended 2, I decided to double it, to be safe), hoping someone would respond. One, Diane Pozefsky, did.
Diane, UNC Director of Undergraduate Research in Computer Science, helped me understand my project better from a technological background, and from a timeline perspective. She told me that the most important thing in any of my candidates is passion. Without passion, they will simmer out. Without passion, they simply won't try. Without passion, you'll get a passionless product. And this was sage advice that I value still in every individual I work with, in any field.
But perhaps most importantly, she told me the words I prayed I would here: "Oh yeah. Any decent college junior can do this for you."
With my lack of any technological knowledge, I had assumed this was going to be tricky. Trickier than Jesse or any of my other CS friends told me it would be. But apparently, the path was clearer than expected. Lesson learned: ask for help from every direction, because everyone has something different to tell you.
Per Professor Pozefsky's advice, I sent out emails to the head of the Undergraduate Computer Science Department of the top 10 schools around the country, asking them to forward a little blurb about Morph, and our search for technical talent over the summer. I put out fliers all over campus with (what I thought were) funny and eye catching messages, asking for applicants who love "breakfast, beer, and also coding".
I received responses from students from MIT, Georgia Tech, Duke, and UNC. Each response, resume attached and with a paragraph describing their excitement about and interest in working on Morph, was highly reminiscent of my own (failed) applications to companies, and an exciting validation of how real this whole process was becoming. It felt good.
I interviewed every individual who applied, no matter how strong or weak the application. Why not? On my part, all it cost was time. And this time invested could have an enormous return if I find the right partner.
A few were excited, though seemingly faking some of it. Some seemed nervous about the prospect of doing it all on their own. One never showed up. I guess she changed her mind.
But one guy came to me with a plan. Oscar Wang arrived at The Looking Glass cafe, one of my favorite work cafes in Chapel Hill, and sat down. He was smiling from the beginning. He told me that he wants to work on a start-up for the excitement of having so much (often too much) responsibility and pressure. The kicker came when he told me he and his best friend David Zhang (who I would be interviewing a few days later) have already thought through some basic elements of what the app would require.
He took out three sheets of paper with drawings, arrows, diagrams, and descriptions on them- a very basic wireframe that he and David had drawn up about what Morph might look like. In truth, it could have all been senseless scribbles. They could have tacked on some pictures from Wired magazine and made a collage. They could have had anything on those papers, but coming to me with enough excitement, forethought and initiative to have put some ideas together before even meeting with me- that was the passion I was looking for. I dragged them on for a bit and had another meeting with the two of them together to chat a little more, but they were hired the second they showed me those papers. About that, I had no doubt.
Did I make the right choice? Are David and Oscar able to build out Morph in the creative, fluid way a west coast start-up with west coast money might be able to? The jury is still out, but I believe in them. I'll keep you updated on how that goes. My next post will be about the reason I decided to forgo any funding, and why I'm happy with that decision.
Techie techie yeahhh
-A
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