Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Flow Ventures written by Raymond Luk (LinkedIn, @rayluk). Follow him on Twitter @rayluk. This post was originally published in January 12, 2012 on Flow Ventures.

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I was having coffee with a founder the other day and we started talking about his hiring plans. Since he’s a non-technical founder (which Ben Yoskovitz claims is a dead-end to begin with) he had several top coders in mind, all of whom were earning big bucks with larger companies.

“I’m paying them a little bit of money but they’ll join full time once I can raise money,” said the founder. It’s something I hear a lot, especially from non-techie founders.

I went back to review some blog posts on Lean hiring, and I came across Eric’s post “Lean Hiring Tips” and Mark MacLeod’s “Fat Hiring for Lean Startups“. Both are worth your time. But I think they’re also written for startups that are already up and running and need to expand. I’m interested in very early stage hiring, e.g. when you’re one person looking for a co-founder or you’re two people looking for your core team.

Companies always take on the characteristics of their founders and in the rush to scale, I find many startups don’t stop to consider how they’re establishing the DNA of their company. The first few hires are the most important ones you’ll make.

• Hire for an experimental mindset – Look for people who enjoy encountering problems, designing ways to solve them, and finding proof of success or failure. Skill at building, whether it’s software or a marketing plan or a sales funnel, is irrelevant at this point. You need people who will volunteer to scrap their plans, not fight you when you want to change course.

How? Join a hackathon, Lean Machine or just create your own (laptop + Starbucks = hackathon). Give your (potential) team a crazy challenge and see who exhibits the right behaviours.

• Hire generalists – A lot of people will disagree with this advice. If you can find the best Python developer in the country go for it. But only if she’s also willing to cold call customers, crank out some Web site copy and help you whiteboard the business model. Your #1 focus is to find a business model that works. The latent technical talent on your bench won’t help you unless you graduate from this first phase

How? Again, hackathons are great practical tests. No matter what their skillset, look for passion about your business model and solving customer problems.

• Prioritize UX over development – This is easier said than done since there’s a shortage of UX talent. But it’s better to have a kick-ass UX person and a mediocre developer than the other way around. UX will help you find your business model and most (good) UX people already have an experimental mindset and generalist attitude

How? Actively seek out UX people, not just developers. You may need to work at a distance if you can’t find local talent. Consider working with less experienced people if they can prove themselves through testing.

• Get skin in the game – Leaving a six figure job to join your startup for a paycut is not skin in the game, or not enough in my books. Hire those people later when you’ve found your business model, have money in the bank, and need to scale. Skin in the game means working full time, just like you are. It means putting their reputation on the line, raising Ramen funding from friends/family/spouses and saying “I’m going to see this through until we fail.”

How? Stop feeling like you’re a poor startup that can’t afford to pay top salaries. Those aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Think of finding your co-founders like raising your first round. You need to get them excited to invest in your business.

I know this advice seems to apply better to “Web” startups than general technology startups, which is a common criticism of Lean startups in general. But I think it applies more broadly. If you hire for the right attitude, you not only solve the critical product-market fit problem, but you set the DNA of your business right from the start. I guess I haven’t seen too many examples of startups failing because they lacked a specific technical skill. They probably think they failed because of it though.

In the end, I guess “hiring” is the wrong word to begin with. You’re looking for people to co-found a business with you. You aren’t buying their skills, you’re asking them to invest in helping you shape the course of your business from the very beginning. Maybe not all of them (including yourself) will be able to scale up with the business. That’s a problem for another day.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Flow Ventures written by Raymond Luk (LinkedIn, @rayluk). Follow him on Twitter @rayluk. This post was originally published in January 12, 2012 on Flow Ventures.

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How do I know that emerging technology is still booming? It is incredibly difficult and competitive to recruit, hire and retain people with startup experience across Canada. Just look at the number of jobs posted on the StartupNorth Job postings:

• Customer Service Hero, Wave Accounting
• Front End Developer, Maintenance Assistant
• City Ambassador aka Sales Lead, Shopcastr
• Lead Developer (Ruby on Rails), Qwalify Inc.
• Web Developer, GoInstant
• View all job postings »

The number one budget item for startups is headcount. For most companies, the people costs far exceed the costs associated with hosting, etc. I don’t know about you but we’re not designing our own servers or opening data centers near the Arctic to reduce the cost of computing and power consumption. It means that the people are the biggest cost for a startup as they grow.

This is different during the initial creation of many of the startups in the bootstrapping phase. We’ve seen a lot of startups get to Minimum Viable Product and start the process of finding a scaleable business model keeping their headcount costs low or close to zero. You might infer that the experience at YCombinator or TechStars or 500Startups is designed to give entrepreneurs the bare minimum of capital and put them in a focused, competitive environment with a deadline (Demo Day) to do the customer development and build the connections necessary for the next stage. Upon exit, many of these companies raise a significant amount of capital. Have you asked yourself why?

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It’s to hire the best people. And it turns out that hiring the best people is not something that can be easily solved with a job posting, or a tweet, or free iPad. Recruiting is Hard! And at startups, it can be difficult to step away from fund raising, product development and customer engagement to focus on the thing that can make or break your business. Ben Yoskovitz wrote a great summary post of his efforts to Recruit and Hire Top People for a Startup that every founder should read:

• 8 Things to Look for When Hiring Startup Talent
• 10 Steps to Successfully Sourcing and Recruiting Startup Talent
• How to Turn Your Company into a Recruiting Magnet
• The Key to Startup Hiring: Build a Magnet
• The Future of Recruiting is Inbound
• The Future of Recruiting is Trust Agents

The war for talent across Canada is just beginning. During my time at VeloCity at UWaterloo, I was impressed at the number of US companies and startups that were actively recruiting on campus. And the established companies aren’t alone, we have seen an increase in the amount of US investments (looking at you GoInstant, Vidyard, TribeHR, Kik, Playerize, Enflick, Shopify, Hootsuite, A Thinking Ape, and others). This will undoubtedly lead to increasing salaries (see @byosko’s # 4 prediction for 2012 in Montreal). It doesn’t even take into consider the continuing recruiting efforts that companies like Rypple, Radian6, Dayforce. For startups, we are going to need to improve our culture and game to keep talent. And getting your startup to a point to raise enough money to pay competitive salaries is going to be the baseline to play in 2012.

If you are designer, marketer or developer and you are curious at who is hiring or if you want an introduction, drop me a note with a resume (david at davidcrow dot ca) and I’ll do my best to match you with companies I know are looking.

There has been a lot of buzz the past 6-8 months about hiring great technical co-founders. The implication seems to be that being a non-technical co-founder is a handicap of sorts and that CEOs buy sandwiches before the product is finished. Apparently coding & building great products is hard, but running the business is easy. Here are some articles:

Why You Can’t Recruit a Technical Cofounder
Quora – Technical Co-Founders
Please, please, please Stop Asking How To Find a Technical Co-Founder
Thoughts On Hiring a Technical Co-Founder

I am a “technical co-founder” at Peek – I code, keep big scale systems up, hire & fire, set dev processes, and all that other technical stuff. So let me tell you about how I got recruited into Peek by Amol Sarva, @amolsarva.

Sell Vaporware

Amol had one VC committed to Peek in our A, and had a letter of intent from Target (yes – www.target.com – that Target) to sell Peeks nation-wide, in-store in the US. The status of the “product” – he had a carved out a wooden model of the Peek (ala Palm)!! And these deals were huge – a $15mm A round with half committed. Target – nation-wide for Christmas 2008!! These days I hear too much crap from “deal guy” founders about finishing product before doing deals. Lame. Be a stud – go sell vaporware. Go get real customers who pay you real money. Go find partners and distributors. I have seen countless, great sales guys in my life sell smoke and mirrors. Why can’t you?

This guy hired me

Hire Other Studs

Amol had recruited John Tantum, former President of Virgin Mobile USA, as our chairman. He had an all-star marketing & retail guru lined up. Our advisory team was the president of BlackBoard, SVP strategy at Intuit, and the former head of the FCC. No matter what, I knew I was going to learn and have an awesome experience working with some great folks.

Be Generally Awesome

Amol was an interesting guy in general. He had a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford. He was/is building a new property in Queens. He took a photo that hangs in MoMA. The blog I write on is startupnorth, the “blogs” he writes on are Salon & Business Insider. Being generally impressive is important. The important question here is the Peter Thiel question, why is employee #20 going to come work for you? The weight of the CEO’s personality and accomplishments matter here. Senior guys will want to know the accomplishments of your business as well as the accomplishments of your management team. You have to be generally awesome enough to bring people in if you aren’t one of those super red hot, Twitter-esque companies.

Be Top Amongst Your Peers

Amol, while starting Peek, was mentoring other founders. He was one of the original members of Founders Roundtable. His peers looked to him for advice on starting a company.

Now, I know this is a bit of a love-in of Amol. And it also probably feels like a pretty high bar. All you have to do is go get a PhD, raise $15mm and get a distro deal done with the second largest retailer in the US before you can hire great technical co-founders.

Not quite. The main lesson is this. Forget your technical co-founder and realize that the “product” is one aspect of your business. Potentially an important one (also potentially a complete waste of time you need to pivot off of). You need to start consistently proving that you can make this business successful without having a “heroic engineering, product only” mindset. Can you on a day-in, day-out basis creatively solve the problems of the business such as acquiring customers faster/cheaper, reducing churn, recruiting great folks, financing the company’s goals, having great customer service, delivering everything on-time, getting great advice, navigating treacherous competitive waters, and so on and so forth. Can you relentlessly out-execute with or without the crutch of great product and fabulous engineering? The way you have built the business pre-launch tells me a lot about how you will run the business post-launch.

If you can do stuff like Amol did, you’ll be fine. If you are buying sandwiches… sorry, go find someone else.

I’d love to hear from other founders (technical or not) on how they both built their company pre-launch and how they found their technical co-founder.

Some rights reserved photo by Seattle Municipal Archives

Startup Weekend Toronto, which kicks off June 3, is almost sold out; if you’re on the fence, don’t wait much longer, StartupNorth readers can save 20% by using discount code: STARTUPNORTHSW

This June’s event will have a strong focus on lean startup principles. A fantastic set of speakers are lined up to provide practical advice so you can take what you learn well beyond the weekend itself. While there is no “right” way to start a company, Startup Weekend is here to help provide you with as many tools and connections as possible to help you succeed.

A great set of speakers for Friday night will kick things off and prepare you for what’s ahead. Throughout the weekend there will be mentors dropping in helping teams with their projects. Saturday night, founders will share war stories. The judging panel includes experienced investors and entrepreneurs who you will have a chance to connect with. Startup Weekend  will round up with dinner and awards at an awesome venue to be announced shortly.

The winner of Startup Weekend will enjoy more than just street cred, in addition there will be a cash award to help move the project forward, entry into the Ryerson DMZ for 4 months, video production to help on the marketing front, pro bono legal services, a chance to demo at the next Democamp Toronto (June 9), and more.

Some rights reserved photo by Chealion

Ask a miner “What is Canada’s most precious natural resource?” and you’ll be sure to stump. The answer is easy… Canadians.

One of the tricks to Silicon Valley’s winning streak is that they back not only repeat entrepreneurs, but repeat teams. Just like one of those wonderful chocolate fountains you occasionally fortune upon at weddings, Silicon Valley recycles people. A team forms, builds a successful enterprise, people move on to try some new things, and projects that find traction attract back the core crew.

Is Canada effectively recycling people? Think long and hard, because if we aren’t the fountain is drying up – end of the party. I can name a handful who have ventured abroad and returned: John Green (@johnphilipgreen), Malgosia Green (@HeyGosia), Dan Morel (@dpmorel), Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar), David Crow (@davidcrow), Jeese Rasch, Zak Homuth (@zakhomuth)… the list goes on, but it could be longer. Maybe our friend Howard Lindzon (@howardlindzon) will start his next company in Canada?

What is bringing them back? Visa issues, sometimes. Spouses, more often. Schools for children, okay I’ll take it. But it would be much better if what brought our best and brightest home was opportunity. And the crazy part is, it is knocking. We have a safe multicultural inclusive country, close to major markets, with investment matching funds up the wazoo, and here is the most beautiful part – our nation is brimming with high caliber engineers (who are getting scooped up by Twitter, Facebook, and Google as you read this post).

Part of the challenge is funding. Canadian entrepreneurs are picking up and moving to New York, San Francisco, Boston, Boulder, and even Santiago (yes you read that right, Chile – in the southern hemisphere) for minuscule sums of seed financing so they can focus 100% on their startups vs their day jobs. Just ask Ken Seville (@civisidedotcom).

Myopic policies might attempt to discourage cross border exits, which are vital and create deep new linkages. Instead what we need to learn is that the opportunity is keeping the founders engaged once they head for warmer climates. I can guarantee, foreign direct investment will not thrive in the absence of results. To generate returns we need to recycle teams.

I am particularly excited about a handful of intiatives that address this gap including: Toronto Homecoming, C100, and Startup Visa. Let’s find ways to support their efforts.

I am a huge F1 racing fan. And I was impressed to see a group of Ontario high school students participating in F1 in Schools at the Ontario Science Centre. It is an amazing concentrated effort to bring together partners and create an educational program for the succession of the people that keep Formula 1 teams building new innovations (that in turn inthrall an audience). The program is a multi-disciplinary challenge for students aged 9 to 19 years to design, build and race gas powered balsa wood F1 cars. What a great opportunity to build the next generation of engineers and designers that are interested in 3-D manufacturing, CAD/CAM, computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, engineering, etc. It provides a training ground to ensure that Formula 1 teams have an educated talent pool with practical experience and excitement.

It has started me wondering about the role we play in exciting the next generation of entrepreneurs. I remember reading that career choices are made by Grade 11 (source needed, I think it was in discussion around STEM careers and girls in IT from the Microsoft DigiGirlz program however I  am not able to find the reference). Much of the work and research seems focused on increasing the number of girls that choose Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

• DotDiva partnership from NCWIT, ACM, and NSF
• Microsoft’s DigiGirlz
• Anita Borg Institue

In the US there is the work of the Kauffman Foundation that supports entrepreneurship through education, training, policy development and other activities.

“The Kauffman Foundation is working to further understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, to advance entrepreneurship education and training efforts, to promote entrepreneurship-friendly policies, and to better facilitate the commercialization of new technologies by entrepreneurs and others, which have great promise for improving the economic welfare of our nation.”

I really like how the Kauffman Foundation has divided up their Entrepreneurship Track: Youth Entrepreneurship; Minority Entrepreneurship; Higher Education; Capital, Markets and Economics; Knowledge, Training and Networks and Global Entrepreneurship. This division allows for the creation of programs, grants and offerings that support different strategic needs of each group.

I am really impressed with the efforts of the team at Communitech. They are doing a great job building the programs, partnerships, and policy work that supports the efforts of Waterloo Region. They have identified the gap left by many of the University focused programs like UW Velocity and Impact, by building and supporting the activities to attract and engage students before they make their post secondary decision. Communitech delivers programs like:

• Zoom Career Days
• Apps Factory
• The Communitech Hub with Conestoga College, UWaterloo CBET + UW Velocity, Wilfred Laurier University MBA
• Science Superheros
• Entrepreneurship Week
• Canada 3.0

It is great to see that Waterloo Region really has an institution that is dedicated to supporting technology companies and startups. And is developing the necessary programs to interest kids in making STEM education and career choices. It shouldn’t be a surprise given that UWaterloo has a pioneered cooperative education program that revolutionizes the career experiences available to students.

There are other programs available that typically focus on post-secondary students We have programs like the:

• MaRS ENT101
• Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CBYF)
• Impact Entrepreneurship Group
• The Next 36
• ACE Canada/SIFE
• Ontario Science Centre

I wonder who outside of Communitech (and maybe BCIC on the west coast) working on programs that support the development of entrepreneurship careers. Are there good global examples of entrepreneurship education and engagement for middle school or high school kids? Where can find other examples of what is working?

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What programs can startups take advantage to find talent possibly with subsidies (yeah I can’t believe I’m saying that) to help develop the next generation of founders. The Government of Canada – Canada Business has a list of Grants, Contributions & Financial Assistance that is a great starting point for getting access.

• Canada Summer Jobs – Hire a student in the summer, this subsidy could cover up to 50% of their wages.
• Co-operative Development Initiative – Innovative Co-op Projects – Maybe we should apply for a StartupNorth sponsored program to place co-op students with startups.
• Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) - Youth Employment Program
• UofT - Professional Experience Year (PEY)

What would be beneficial to startups is an agency that actively matches students and funding programs with my current business needs and stage of corporate development. Rather than relying on me to change my focus from product development, customer development, sales and marketing to educational program participation. It would be great if there was an member-driven organization like Communitech that was focused on making these programs accessible to me.

I want to see programs like Maker Faire (check out the mini-Maker Faire on May 7-8, 2011), Ace Canada Student Entrepreneur Competition, Ivey Business Plan Competition, Moot Corporation, Extreme University, etc. The hard part is how to increase startup participation in the growth, development and refinement of the talent and ideology without distracting founders from their missions to build successful businesses.

Who, how and what should be done to continue to build a culture starting with middle school and high school students to help encourage entrepreneurship as a career path? What do other startups want to see? I’m interested in hearing from John MacRitchie (@jmacritchie), Anand Agarwala (@anandx), Scott Pelton (@spelton), Brian Sharwood (@bsharwood), Lauren Friese (@LaurenFriese), Danny Robinson (@dannyrobinson) and others.

The Web Startup Society at the University of Toronto is hosting a startup career faire on April 7, 2011.

This is a great opportunity for local startups looking to hire developers, interns, engineers, designers, and other smart problem solving kids from UofT.

Startups can apply to recruit, it’s $50 and the deadline is March 25.

Web Startup Society in partnership with Career Centre invites startups to apply for Startup Job Fair to be held on April 7th, 2011 from 1-4pm at Career Centre, Koffler Student Services Centre, 214 College Street, Toronto, ON

This application form will help us select which Startups would be eligible. A team of review panel consisting of someone from the career centre, a CS faculty member, and a KMDI member will decide which Startups would qualify based on two simple criteria.

We’re looking for companies that already have funding and have demonstrated the potential to provide a good level of job experience for student applicants. If you’re one of the companies that get selected, we request a $50 fee to cover the expenses of holding the event. If you have any further inquiries, kindly send an email to biljana.carter@utoronto.ca. For more details, check out

Appy for UofT Startup Job Faire