![](https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/01/3-1.png/")
YC application video</a>, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?app_answers=true\%22>written application answers</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?demo_day_video_public=true\%22>Demo Day video</a> public on the YC Startup Directory. Click into a company’s page to watch how the founders pitched their startup to group partners, like <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab/">Gitlab and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/webflow/">Webflow.![](https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/01/4-1.png/")
online trade shows</a>.</p><h3 id=\"c-grit\">c. Grit</h3><p>When we first started, we couldn’t afford to build the most beautiful piece of engineering work. We had to be fast and agile. This is critical when you are pre-product-market fit. Our CEO Max and a few early employees would go to trade shows to present our product to customers, understand their needs, and learn what resonated with them. Max would call us with new ideas several times a day. It was paramount that our engineers were <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-book//">gritty and able to quickly make changes to the product. Over the three or four days of a trade show, our team deployed changes nonstop to the platform. We experimented with offerings like:</p><ul><li>Free shipping on first orders</li><li>Buy now, pay later</li><li>Buy from a brand and get $100 off when you re-order from the same brand</li><li>Free returns</li></ul><p>By trying different value propositions in a short time, our engineering team helped us figure out what was most valuable to our customers. That was how we found strong product-market fit within six months of starting the company.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/CrRDf25EV8if-oP6rfEnSYeA_ttfKsayeQoM61gMOYFODZvpYsId0z2Y5RQ8z5xH4zt8UQaPBOwe1xus8oaqKQW1zxqNxz_ss9LHTpWyCc6tWsyJUm6_g6lVUtb6PkHluwNcqIU9MN3silgCLqtNHO2S8RkPcQCHBYiVPhK9Fteoiq_w9dZJqaxTqA/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"></figure><p><em>Our trade show storefront back when we were called Indigo Fair.</em></p><h2 id=\"2-build-a-solid-long-term-foundation-from-day-one\">2. Build a solid long-term foundation from day one</h2><p>The number one impediment to engineering velocity at scale is a lack of solid, consistent foundation. A simple but solid foundation will allow your team to keep building on top of it instead of having to throw away or re-architecture your base when hypergrowth starts.</p><p>To create a solid long-term foundation, you first need to get clear on what practices you believe are important for your engineering team to scale. For example, I remember speaking with senior engineers at other startups who were surprised we were writing tests and doing code reviews and that we had a code style guide from the very early days. But we couldn’t have operated well without these processes. When we started to grow fast and add lots of engineers, we were able to keep over 95% of the team focused on building features and adding value to our customers, increasing our growth. </p><p>Once you know what long-term foundations you want to build, you need to write it down. We were intentional about this from day one and documented it in our <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://craft.faire.com/handbook-89f166841ec9/">engineering handbook</a>. Today, every engineer is onboarded using this handbook.</p><p>The four foundational elements we decided on were:</p><h3 id=\"a-being-data-driven\">a. Being data-driven</h3><p>The most important thing is to build your data muscle early. We started doing this at 10 customers. At the time, the data wasn’t particularly useful; the more important thing was to start to collect it. At some point, you’ll need data to drive product decision-making. The longer you wait, the harder it is to embed into your team.</p><p>Here’s what I recommend you start doing as early as possible:</p><ul><li>Set up data pipelines that feed into a data warehouse.</li><li>Start collecting data on how people are using your product. As you add features and iterate, record how those changes are impacting user interactions. All of this should go into a data warehouse that is updated within minutes and made available to your team. As your product gets increasingly complex, it will become more and more important to use data to validate your intuition.</li><li>We use Redshift to store data. As user events are happening, our relational database (MySQL) replicates them in Redshift. Within minutes, the data is available for queries and reports.</li><li>Train your team to use experimentation frameworks.</li><li>Make it part of the product development process. The goal is to transform your intuition into a statistically testable statement. A good place to start is to establish principles and high-level steps for your team to follow when they run experiments. We’ve set principles around when to run experiments vs. when not to, that running rigorous experiments should be the default (and when it isn’t), and when to stop an experiment earlier than expected. We also have teams log experiments in a Notion dashboard.</li><li>The initial focus should be on what impact you think a feature will have and how to measure that change. As you’re scoping a feature, ask questions like: How are we going to validate that this feature is achieving intended goals? What events/data do we need to collect to support that? What reports are we going to build? Over time, these core principles will expand.</li><li>The entire team should be thinking about this, not just the engineers or data team. We reinforced the importance of data fluency by pushing employees to learn SQL, so that they could run their own queries and experience the data firsthand.</li><li>It’ll take you multiple reps to get this right. We still miss steps and fail to collect the right data. The sooner you get your team doing this, the easier it will be to teach it to new people and become better at it as an organization.</li></ul><h3 id=\"b-our-choice-of-programming-language-and-database\">b. Our choice of programming language and database</h3><p>When choosing a language and database, pick something you know best that is also scalable long-term.<strong> </strong>If you choose a language you don’t know well because it seems easier or faster to get started, you won’t foresee pitfalls and you’ll have to learn as you go. This is expensive and time-consuming. We started with Java as our backend programming language and MySQL as our relational database. In the early days, we were building two to three features per week and it took us a couple of weeks to build the framework we needed around MySQL. This was a big tradeoff that paid dividends later on.</p><h3 id=\"c-writing-tests-from-day-one\">c. Writing tests from day one</h3><p>Many startups think they can move faster by not writing tests; it’s the opposite. Tests help you avoid bugs and prevent legacy code at scale. They aren’t just validating the code you are writing now. They should be used to enforce, validate, and document requirements. Good tests protect your code from future changes as your codebase grows and features are added or changed. They also catch problems early and help avoid production bugs, saving you time and money. Code without tests becomes legacy very fast. Within months after untested code is written, no one will remember the exact requirements, edge cases, constraints, etc. If you don’t have tests to enforce these things, new engineers will be afraid of changing the code in case they break something or change an expected behavior.<br><br>There are two reasons why tests break when a developer is making code changes:</p><ul><li>Requirements change. In this case, we expect tests to break and they should be updated to validate and enforce the new requirements.</li><li>Behavior changes unexpectedly. For example, a bug was introduced and the test alerted us early in the development process.</li></ul><p>Every language has tools to measure and keep track of test coverage. I highly recommend introducing them early to track how much of your code is protected by tests. You don’t need to have 100% code coverage, but you should make sure that critical paths, important logic, edge cases, etc. are well tested. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://leanylabs.com/blog/good-unit-tests//">Here are tips for writing good tests</a>.</p><h3 id=\"d-doing-code-reviews\">d. Doing code reviews</h3><p>We started doing code reviews when we hired our first engineer. Having another engineer review your code changes helps ensure quality, prevents mistakes, and shares good patterns. In other words, it’s a great learning tool for new and experienced engineers. Through code reviews, you are teaching your engineers patterns: what to avoid, why to do something, the features of languages you should and shouldn’t use. </p><p>Along with this, you should have a coding style guide. Coding guides help enforce consistency and quality on your engineering team. It doesn’t have to be complex. We use a tool that formats our code so our style guide is automatically enforced before a change can be merged. This leads to higher code quality, especially when teams are collaborating and other people are reviewing code.</p><p>We switched from Java to Kotlin in 2019 and we have a comprehensive style guide that includes recommendations and rules for programming in Kotlin. For anything not explicitly specified in our guide, we ask that engineers follow <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coding-conventions.html/">JetBrains’ coding conventions</a>.</p><p>These are the code review best practices we share internally:</p><ul><li>#bekind when doing a code review. Use positive phrasing where possible (\"there might be a better way\" instead of \"this is terrible\"; \"how about we name this X?\" instead of \"naming this Y is bad\"). It's easy to unintentionally come across as critical, especially if you have a remote team.</li><li>Don't block changes from being merged if the issues are minor (e.g., a request for variable name change, indentation fixes). Instead, make the ask verbally. Only block merging if the request contains potentially dangerous changes that could cause issues or if there is an easier/safer way to accomplish the same.</li><li>When doing a code review, ensure that the code adheres to your style guide. When giving feedback, refer to the relevant sections in the style guide.</li><li>If the code review is large, consider checking out the branch locally and inspecting the changes in IntelliJ (Git tab on the bottom). It’s easier to have all of the navigation tools at hand.</li></ul><h2 id=\"3-track-engineering-metrics-to-drive-decision-making\">3. Track engineering metrics to drive decision-making</h2><p>Tracking metrics is imperative to maintaining engineering velocity. Without clear metrics, Faire would be in the dark about how our team is performing and where we should focus our efforts. We would have to rely on intuition and assumptions to guide what we should be prioritizing. </p><p>Examples of metrics we started tracking early (at around 20 engineers) included:</p><ul><li><strong>Uptime.</strong> One of the first metrics we tracked was <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/uptime//">uptime. We started measuring this because we were receiving anecdotal reports of site stability issues. Once we started tracking it, we confirmed the anecdotal evidence and dedicated a few engineers to resolve the issue.</li><li><strong>CI wait time.</strong> Another metric that was really important was CI wait time (i.e., time for the build system to build/test pull requests). We were receiving anecdotal reports of long CI wait times for developers, confirmed it with data, and fixed the issue.</li></ul><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KiE8tjsqkFvtJFmyY_6-IinXuT1A6C4x6JBUSX9qb9nDHB9lurJZAlHocGDEi3Sx_HSHNuBxozMBljGOsNokrQIJ9Hk6ZolI39yQtKPz0yuAbue0G2weaKWXqD65_Gbal_LYuEC5TpPoGIdCGd0jflhy1yRQzuG-pxV1IePbh8LuEtvqehC1gHs5lw/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"></figure><p><em>This is a dashboard we created in the early days of Faire to track important engineering metrics. It was updated manually by collecting data from different sources. Today, we have more comprehensive dashboards that are fully automated.</em></p><p>Once our engineering team grew to 100+, our top-level metrics became more difficult to take action against. When metrics trended beyond concerning thresholds, we didn’t have a clear way to address them. Each team was busy with their own product roadmap, and it didn’t seem worthwhile to spin up new teams to address temporary needs. Additionally, many of the problems were large in scale and would have required a dedicated group of engineers. </p><p>We found that the best solution was to build <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/the-power-of-tagged-metrics//">dimensions so that we could view metrics by team. Once we had metrics cut by team, we could set top-down expectations and priorities. We were happy to see that individual teams did a great job of taking ownership of and improving their metrics and, consequently, the company’s top-level metrics.</p><h4 id=\"an-example-transaction-run-duration\">An example: transaction run duration</h4><p>Coming out of our virtual trade show, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.faire.com/thestudio/faire-summer-market-2021-our-global-trade-show-event-is-coming-in-july//">Faire Summer Market</a>, we knew we needed significant investment in our database utilization. During the event, site usage pushed our database capacity to its limits and we realized we wouldn’t be able to handle similar events in the future.</p><p>In response, we created a metric of how long transactions were open every time our application interacted with the database. Each transaction was attributed to a specific team. We then had a visualization of the hottest areas of our application along with the teams responsible for those areas. We asked each team to set a goal during our planning process to reduce their database usage by 20% over a three-month period. The aggregate results were staggering. Six months later, before our next event—<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.faire.com/thestorefront/announcing-faires-2022-winter-virtual-trade-show-events//">Faire Winter Market</a>—incoming traffic was 1.6x higher, but we were nowhere close to maxing out our database capacity. Now, each team is responsible for monitoring their database utilization and ensuring it doesn’t trend in the wrong direction.</p><h3 id=\"managing-metrics-with-kpi-scorecards\">Managing metrics with KPI scorecards</h3><p>We’re moving towards a model where each team maintains a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that get published as a scorecard reflecting how successful the team is at maintaining its product areas and the parts of the tech stack it owns.</p><p>We’re starting with a top-level scorecard for the whole engineering team that tracks our highest-level KPIs (e.g., <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/guide/configure_an_apdex_for_your_traces_with_datadog_apm//">Apdex, database utilization, CI wait time, severe bug escapes, flaky tests). Each team maintains a scorecard with its assigned top-level KPIs as well as domain-specific KPIs. As teams grow and split into sub-teams, the scorecards follow the same path recursively. Engineering leaders managing multiple teams use these scorecards to gauge the relative success of their teams and to better understand where they should be focusing their own time.</p><p>Scorecard generation should be as automated and as simple as possible so that it becomes a regular practice. If your process requires a lot of manual effort, you’re likely going to have trouble committing to it on a regular cadence. Many of our metrics start in DataDog; we use their API to extract relevant metrics and push them into Redshift and then visualize them in Mode reports.</p><p>As we’ve rolled this process out, we’ve identified criteria for what makes a great engineering KPI:</p><ul><li><strong>Can be measured and has a believable source of truth.</strong> If capturing and viewing KPIs is not an easy and repeatable task, it’s bound to stop happening. Invest in the infrastructure to reliably capture KPIs in a format that can be easily queried.</li><li><strong>Clearly ladders up to a top-level business metric.</strong> If there isn’t a clear connection to a top-level business metric, you’ll have a hard time convincing stakeholders to take action based on the data. For example, we’ve started tracking pager volume for our critical services: High pager volume contributes to tired and distracted engineers which leads to less code output, which leads to fewer features delivered, which ultimately means less customer value.</li><li><strong>Is independent of other KPIs.</strong> When viewing and sharing KPIs, give appropriate relative weight to each one depending on your priorities. If you’re showing two highly correlated KPIs (e.g., cycle time and PR throughput), then you’re not leaving room for something that’s less correlated (e.g., uptime). You might want to capture some correlated KPIs so that you can quickly diagnose a worrying trend, but you should present non-duplicative KPIs when crafting the overall scorecard that you share with stakeholders.</li><li><strong>Is normalized in a meaningful way.</strong> Looking at absolute numbers can be misleading in a high-growth environment, which makes it hard to compare performance across teams. For example, we initially tracked growth of overall infrastructure cost. The numbers more than doubled every year, which was concerning. When we later normalized this KPI by the amount of revenue a product was producing, we observed the KPI was flat over time. Now we have a clear KPI of “amount spent on infrastructure to generate $1 in revenue.” This resulted in us being comfortable with our rate of spend, whereas previously we were considering staffing a team to address growing infrastructure costs.</li></ul><p>We plan to keep investing in this area as we grow. KPIs allow us to work and build with confidence, knowing that we’re focusing on the right problems to continue serving our customers.</p><h2 id=\"4-keep-teams-small-and-independent\">4. Keep teams small and independent</h2><p>When we were a company of 25 employees, we had a single engineering team. Eventually, we split into two teams in order to prioritize multiple areas simultaneously and ship faster. When you split into multiple teams, things can break because people lose context. To navigate this, we developed a pod structure to ensure that every team was able to operate independently but with all the context and resources they needed. </p><p>When you first create a pod structure, here are some rules of thumb:</p><ul><li><strong>Pods should operate like small startups.</strong> Give them a mission, goals, and the resources they need. It’s up to them to figure out the strategy to achieve those goals. Pods at Faire typically do an in-person offsite to brainstorm ideas and come up with a prioritized roadmap and expected business results, which they then present for feedback and approval.</li><li><strong><strong><strong>Each pod should have no more than 8 to 10 employees. </strong></strong></strong>For us, pods generally include 5 to 7 engineers (including an engineering manager), a product manager, a designer, and a data scientist.</li><li><strong>Each pod should have a clear leader. </strong>We have an engineering manager and a product manager co-lead each pod. We designed it this way to give engineering a voice and more ownership in the planning process.</li><li><strong>Expect people to be members of multiple pods. </strong>While this isn’t ideal, there isn’t any other way to do it early on. Resources are constrained, and you need a combination of seasoned employees and new hires on each pod (otherwise they’ll lack context). Pick one or two people who have lots of context to seed the pod, then add new members. When we first did this, pods shared backend engineers, designers, and data analysts, and had their own product manager and frontend engineer.</li><li><strong>If you only have one product, assign a pod to each well-defined part of the product.</strong> If there’s not an obvious way to split up your product surface area, try to break it out into large features and assign a pod to each.</li><li><strong><strong><strong>Keep reporting lines and performance management within functional teams. </strong></strong></strong>This makes it easier to maintain:</li></ul><p>\t\t(1) Standardized tooling/processes across the engineering team and balanced \t\tleadership between functions</p><p>\t\t(2) Standardized career frameworks and performance calibration. We give our \t\tmanagers guidance and tools to make sure this is happening. For example, I \t\thave a spreadsheet for every manager that I expect them to update on a \t \t\tmonthly basis with a scorecard and brief summary of their direct reports’ \t\t \t\tperformance.</p><h3 id=\"how-we-stay-on-top-of-resource-allocation-census-and-horsepower\">How we stay on top of resource allocation: Census and Horsepower</h3><p>Our engineering priorities change often. We need to be able to move engineers around and create, merge, split, or sunset pods. In order to keep track of who is on which team—taking into account where that person is located, their skill set, tenure at the company, and more—we built a tool called Census.</p><p>Census is a real-time visualization of our team’s structure. It automatically updates with data from our ATS and HR system. The visual aspect is crucial and makes it easier for leadership to make decisions around resource allocation and pod changes as priorities shift. Alongside Census, we also built an algorithm to evaluate the “horsepower” of a pod. If horsepower is showing up as yellow or red, that pod either needs more senior engineers, has a disproportionate number of new employees, or both.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pJk7SUqsmeQLU_dYU3BrN5wMnzyHwVySmydpuiNbHgDddt_FzwwQzCQ_pQH75FX-InduoRGg5hSVhcfXZxRC3FztBZ3aF_2JnwIFMBOhjSey2cgRQEqs38oORhgZgrtwrmgO7CM-WSU_34oeyp15hdzHOrH_FAXTlFlJOt-A87J4Brce_ri3MER8RA/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption>.</figcaption></figure><p><em>Census.</em></p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/N7btbx4GDkomhZp8wj0CMlTiGywqDffV6qCakK6aZEILScjRiIqjhwjV1q2AlT6bmrzU9vqo_pa1ggXn8j_C0CWsO4BEQdHoq5EcPfOhZwhe8tg1oMmmmDeYQXNrjF99WOdM5AKVTT5GAisZM_idtecOsjdXH_qQ2ezvEVRLltbkMfmk1j3qouwt7g/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"></figure><p><em>Pods are colored either green, yellow, or red depending on their horsepower.</em><br><br>One of the most common questions that founders have is how to balance speed with everything else: product quality, architecture debt, team culture. Too often, startups stall out and sacrifice their early momentum in order to correct technical debt. In building Faire, we set out to both establish a unified foundation <em>and</em> continue shipping fast. These four guiding principles are how we did it, and I hope they help others do the same.</p>","comment_id":"6357f9044557ad0001018040","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template-2.jpeg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-25T07:56:04.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T12:38:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-25T09:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. 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Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four guiding principles.","reading_time":16,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"6356a9c957e9f90001984b62","uuid":"32e1602f-ec89-49b0-932c-61ef6bbacfcb","title":"YC Founder Firesides: Mutiny on AI and the next era of company growth","slug":"yc-founder-firesides-mutiny-on-ai-and-the-next-era-of-company-growth","html":"<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.mutinyhq.com//">Mutiny (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mutiny/">YC S18</a>) uses AI and data to convert website visitors into customers. Today, the fastest growing B2B companies such as Notion and Snowflake use Mutiny to identify ideal customers, determine sections of websites that will increase conversion, and produce copy that converts visitors into customers. </p><p>YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/status/1557784730543632384/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with Mutiny co-founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/jalehr/">Jaleh Rezaei</a> to talk about their <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/jalehr/status/1582352047659024385/">recent acquisition</a> of Intellipse, an AI marketing platform, as well as how AI will impact the next era of growth. Throughout, Jaleh shares advice about acquisitions as a growth strategy and evolving your product with AI. </p><p>You can listen here or on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dy1qB7XQfOryE4kj4spGS/">Spotify, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/160-yc-founder-firesides-mutiny-on-ai-and-the-next/id1236907421?i=1000583708925\%22>Apple Podcasts</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yNxaNzAPPnKj/">Twitter.Pave helps companies plan, communicate, and benchmark employee compensation. Today, the company has 160 employees, more than 3,500 customers, and is valued at $1.6B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/matthewschulman?lang=en\%22>Matt Schulman</a> has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community. We sat down with Matt to hear his insight on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/pave-2/">building a team</a> in the early stages of his company and today as a CEO of a growth-stage company. </p><p><strong>Many of the first Pave employees were hired as a contractor before converting to a full-time employee. Would you recommend this strategy to founders? </strong></p><p>I strongly recommend the contract-to-hire setup in the early days of a startup, as it led me to have a 100% close rate with the candidates we wanted to convert to full-time. This strategy worked for two reasons: </p><p>1) By the end of the contract, the contractors had poured weeks of energy into the work – learning the code base and investing their time – and getting to know potential coworkers. This escalated their sense of commitment.</p><p>2) I was flexible on working hours – open to them working nights or weekends. This made it easier for the candidates who were busy with full-time employment to say yes to working with Pave and earn extra income on the side. </p><p>To convince people who were employed to work for Pave as a contractor on top of their current job, I framed the process as a mutual evaluation. This is an opportunity to evaluate the company and come to a mutual decision at the end of 2, 4, or 6 weeks together – no pressure. We paid them a fair market rate, and as mentioned, we were flexible on working hours. One contractor worked their day job until 5:00pm and then on Pave from 6:00pm-2:00am, for example. They were excited to be able to build something from the ground up and work closely with me at the earliest stage of the company – which is another strategy I used to encourage people to work with us. </p><p>Before Pave, I was an engineer at Facebook and regularly worked on side projects. These projects were my fun, guilty pleasures because when I built something from the ground up, I felt an emotional attachment to the work. Usually engineers at large companies feel part of a machine, but when they build something full-stack from the ground up, there’s a magical allure to that work. I gave those contractors ownership over the work and often jammed out with them – working side by side at all hours. (One note: I did not have the contractors touch customer PII.) Within weeks, we’d both know whether Pave would be a good fit, and if so, we were already committed to each other.</p><p><strong>What were you looking for in early employees? </strong></p><p>When starting to build out the team, I was given a tip that the first 10 hires would set the tone for the next 100. Because of this, I personally recruited 100% of the early Pave employees. I sourced people, took phone screens, went to dinner, coffee, and on walks with candidates, and spoke with them for hours on Zoom and Facetime. It was an all-encompassing process. But I found that early advice to be accurate: The first 10 employees are the most important aspect in the company’s life cycle – other than finding product-market fit – and recruiting has to be the founder’s priority.</p><p>When recruiting for the first ten employees, I wasn’t looking for experts in specific areas but generalists with rapid career growth, passion for our mission, and a hunger to work. Those early employees readily tackled whatever fire we were facing that day from engineering work and sales to back office and HR. I also had a deep level of trust with those first ten hires, as they were all in my network. </p><p>Today, I still look for mission alignment and hunger but there are times I need to hire a specialist. I identify the tightest set of criteria for the role and only talk to people who fit that criteria. This is very different from the early days when I was solely looking for generalists who could fill multiple roles.</p><p><strong>How did you convince those early employees to join Pave? </strong></p><p>I always found ways to continue our conversation even when I could sense the candidate wanted to turn down the offer. I would do this by scheduling future conversations – saying that I needed to share something new with them – and then I would get to work writing a Google Doc that showed how I planned to invest in their career. We still use this strategy at Pave today, but it has evolved and is now affectionately called the collaborative Google Doc.</p><p>The collaborative Google Doc is shared with the candidate and used throughout the entire interview process. The document outlines expectations for the role and frames the interview process in stages, communicating which stage the candidate is in at any given time to ensure we are working within their ideal timeline. We encourage the candidate to comment and add their thoughts to the document, including feedback for me and their thoughts on the interview process.</p><p>As we get further into the interview process, I get more specific about what I’m looking for in a candidate. And when we get even deeper, I write multiple pages on what I’ve learned about their career aspirations through our conversations and backchanneling, and how I’m going to support them. </p><p>When it comes to backchanneling for potential executive hires, I try to talk with at least 10 people and ask, “If I have the privilege to be this person's manager, I want to set them up for the utmost success. What are your specific recommendations about the best ways to set this person up for success and unleash their full potential?” This 360 review is shared with the candidate right before I deliver the compensation package. I outline what I learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and specific ways that I’ll push them and support them.</p><p>When I communicate compensation, I lay out all the facts, including cash amount, equity (shares and dollar amount), and the benefits package. In addition, we also share:</p><ul><li>The salary band for the role (and implicitly their position in it).</li><li>The level that the employee will be in the organization, along with more information on our leveling framework and what each level means.</li><li>The methodology for determining the compensation, like the market data we use (75th percentile for similar stage companies).</li><li>Broader information on compensation philosophy, including how someone moves through the band, gets promoted, etc.</li><li>Additional info on equity: current preferred price, current post money valuation, details on vesting, PTE window, 409A price, and more – essentially everything they need to determine the actual value of the grant.</li></ul><p>We’re ultra transparent about compensation because compensation should not be a guessing game; people deserve to understand every aspect of their compensation package and how it was derived. I then offer to meet live to answer any questions or discuss feedback – or ask them to leave their comments in the Google Doc. Most candidates will ask questions in the document, as it can be more approachable.</p><p><strong>For every open role at Pave, a Slack channel is created to drive urgency and ensure no detail goes missed. Tell me about this process. </strong></p><p>As a seed-stage company, I was creating Slack channels for every role. Today, Slack channels are created for roles that I’m involved with – like hiring a head of finance or VP of engineering. The process still looks the same, however. </p><p>I create a Slack channel for that role and add relevant stakeholders. Every morning I ask for an update. What’s the movement? Have we sourced any more candidates? Have we talked with candidates X, Y, and Z? I do this to keep the process moving forward every day. I also post updates – sharing with the team when I spoke with a reference, for example. When we extend an offer, I use this Slack channel to encourage stakeholders to reach out to the candidate through text messages or Loom videos. </p><p>Loom videos are an interesting medium. If you’re a candidate and receive six Loom videos from different people at the company, it may feel bizarre and a bit overwhelming. But the videos show we are excited about the candidate and also gives insight into our energetic culture. </p><p><strong>You also review email copy and do drip campaigns for candidate outreach. Tell me about this. </strong></p><p>We have a pre-written email sequence that is sent from me or the hiring manager depending on the context, and then we use <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gem/">Gem to automate this. The response rates for these campaigns are much higher than if the emails were coming from a recruiter. Before the emails are sent out, I’ll spend 30 minutes personalizing 30 emails (one to two sentences at the onset of the email) that will be sent to target profiles. And then it’s important you do a drip. If you only send one email, most of the time the candidate won’t respond. I find sending a third email with a short message like, “Hey, any thoughts?” leads to the most responses. </p><p><strong>How do you think about where your job ends and your team begins when it comes to recruiting?</strong></p><p>Today, if I’m not the hiring manager, I delegate and come in only at the end of the process for a sell call. The process looks vastly different if I’m the hiring manager. I spend a lot of time reviewing resumes and identifying the top 25 profiles in the space. Every outreach to them is very personalized, and I have time to do this because I focus on quality over quantity of candidates. Quality over quantity was a big lesson for me, actually. At first, I would look at all inbound resumes and thousands of applicants. But I have come to realize that I have more success when I map out the market and find the top 25 candidates in the space. Then I'll find a way to get one of them in the door.</p><p><strong>Describe the ideal candidate for senior-level positions when Pave was a smaller company. </strong></p><p>As a company of 35 people, we didn’t need managers who delegated – which has merit at a later-stage company. We needed people who would personally take on the hard work. Often, first-time founders hire someone senior for optics reasons. Instead, you should look for someone earlier in their career who has grown at a crazy high slope – often referred to in the tech industry as a high-slope candidate versus a Y-intercept candidate. There is a time and place for both types of hires, but as a 35-person startup, almost always go for the slope, not the high Y-intercept. And in some cases, you may meet exceptional candidates with both high slope and high Y-intercept. This is the dream case!</p><p>Another mistake first-time founders can make is rushing hires by trying to squeeze them in before a term sheet. Don’t try to meet some arbitrary deadline or cliff date. If it takes six months or a year to hire an executive, that’s ok – wait for the right person.*<br><br><em>*This answer has been updated to clarify the founder’s intention behind the statement.</em></p>","comment_id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--8-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-13T11:23:10.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T08:44:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-17T09:00:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"634d76fe3f2ab90001338eb9","name":"#21831","slug":"hash-21831","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-ceo-matt-schulman-pave/","excerpt":"Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"633c56ed248d7f00015cff8c","uuid":"777c1383-0075-4365-91a3-409c07cce3a8","title":"Exclusive access to software deals for employees at YC companies","slug":"announcing-yc-deals","html":"<p>We are thrilled to announce that employees at YC companies can now leverage one of the major benefits previously only available to YC founders – <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://deals.ycombinator.com//">YC Deals</a>. Through YC Deals, employees have access to more than 100 discounts and exclusive offers on industry leading tools. There are already $500,000 worth of free credits and discounts available, and new deals are constantly being added.</p><p>We built YC Deals for our companies with a growing team. The founders still want to take advantage of the wide variety of discounts and free credits that YC companies receive, but their employees don’t have access to Bookface (our internal platform for YC founders), where these exclusive deals are listed. Now any employee of a YC company can redeem these deals and help their company save money. </p><p>Building something new? There are dozens of dev tools like PostHog, Fivetran, and OneSignal. First HR or ops hire? Get Deel and Stable up and running at a discount. In charge of security? Check out Vanta. Also find deals on startup staples, like Gusto, GitHub, Algolia, and Amplitude. Help build and grow your company using world-class tools on a startup budget. </p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/10/Untitled-design.png/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1600\" height=\"919\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2022/10/Untitled-design.png 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2022/10/Untitled-design.png 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/10/Untitled-design.png 1600w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"></figure><p>Employees at YC companies can access YC Deals by completing a simple email verification flow using their company email address <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://deals.ycombinator.com//">here.
If you’d like to offer a deal to the YC community and their employees, you can submit one <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/deals/new/">here. <br><br>Any additional questions about YC Deals? Visit our FAQs <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://deals.ycombinator.com/faq/">here.
","comment_id":"633c56ed248d7f00015cff8c","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/ycombinator_YCDeals_02--1-.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-04T08:53:17.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-06T09:00:00.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-06T09:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"We are thrilled to announce that employees at YC companies can now leverage one of the major benefits previously only available to YC founders – YC Deals. Through YC Deals, employees have access to more than 100 discounts and exclusive offers on industry leading tools.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d5","name":"Oliver Ortlieb","slug":"oliver","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/628992b833890e985ce8e2e80ef915a453d0a080.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Oliver is a two-time YC founder, who participated in the S13 and W17 batches. He has built 3D printing factories that run from a web browser, digital asset management tools, and custom-fit face masks.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/oliver/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d5","name":"Oliver Ortlieb","slug":"oliver","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/10/628992b833890e985ce8e2e80ef915a453d0a080.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Oliver is a two-time YC founder, who participated in the S13 and W17 batches. He has built 3D printing factories that run from a web browser, digital asset management tools, and custom-fit face masks.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/oliver/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/announcing-yc-deals/","excerpt":"We are thrilled to announce that employees at YC companies can now leverage one of the major benefits previously only available to YC founders – YC Deals. Through YC Deals, employees have access to more than 100 discounts and exclusive offers on industry leading tools.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"6335e2416c330f000113fac3","uuid":"35201943-5292-4030-906c-00e0478b0141","title":"First Five Launches with Whatnot","slug":"first-five-launches-with-whatnot","html":"<p>Today <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.whatnot.com//">Whatnot (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/whatnot/">W20) is a lively platform where collectors can buy, sell, go live, and geek out with other like-minded people across a wide variety of product categories. But, like every startup, the founders of Whatnot began with only an idea. YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with the co-founder and CEO of Whatnot <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/grantlafontaine?lang=en\%22>Grant LaFontaine</a> to discuss their first five launches.</p><p>The takeaways are below, and the interview can be watched on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKD0IAcwMig\%22>Youtube.Here%e2%80%99s a sector breakdown of our Top Companies:</p><!--kg-card-begin: markdown--><p>B2B Software and Services: 43.3%<br>\nHealthcare: 11.5%<br>\nEducation: 2.7%<br>\nConsumer: 13.3%<br>\nFinancial Technology: 18.8%<br>\nReal Estate and Construction: 3.0%<br>\nIndustrials: 7.0%<br>\nGovernment: .3%</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: markdown--><p>Congrats to all of the YC founders who are building these amazing companies! <br><br>Meet some of the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/featured/">featured companies</a> on the list and learn more about the founders, their missions, and the predictions they have for the future. To see a full list of YC companies, visit the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/">YC Startup Directory</a>.</p>","comment_id":"630443393abd0500014104a3","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/08/BlogTwitter-Image-Template.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-08-22T20:02:17.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-08-23T09:32:07.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-08-23T08:55:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today we’re excited to release an update to the YC Top Companies list. 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Recent Posts (Startups)
All Posts
How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale
by Marcelo Cortes10/25/2022
Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four guiding principles.
YC Founder Firesides: Mutiny on AI and the next era of company growth
by Y Combinator10/24/2022
YC’s Anu Hariharan sat down with Mutiny co-founder and CEO Jaleh Rezaei to talk about their recent acquisition of Intellipse, an AI marketing platform, as well as how AI will impact the next era of growth.
Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring
by Lindsay Amos10/17/2022
Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.
Exclusive access to software deals for employees at YC companies
by Oliver Ortlieb10/6/2022
We are thrilled to announce that employees at YC companies can now leverage one of the major benefits previously only available to YC founders – YC Deals. Through YC Deals, employees have access to more than 100 discounts and exclusive offers on industry leading tools.
First Five Launches with Whatnot
by Y Combinator9/29/2022
Like every startup, the founders of Whatnot began with only an idea. YC’s Anu Hariharan sat down with the co-founder and CEO of Whatnot Grant LaFontaine to discuss their first five launches, and how they helped shape the company into a billion dollar marketplace today.
Y Combinator Top Companies - August 2022
by Y Combinator8/23/2022
Today we’re excited to release an update to the YC Top Companies list. There are now 15 public YC companies, 316 private YC companies that are valued at over $150M, and over 80 are valued at over $1B.
First Five Hires with PostHog
by Y Combinator8/16/2022
PostHog (YC W20) is a suite of open source product analytic tools that companies can host themselves. YC’s Anu Hariharan sat down with the co-founder and CEO of PostHog James Hawkins to discuss hiring their first five employees.