As you can probably imagine, Nick and I used Gem in some way or another to hire most of our founding team. It was a combination of 2a. Sourcing 1st-degree connections, 2b. Referrals, 2c. Sourcing 2nd-degree connections using strong connector nodes.

Here’s our founding team of eight Gems that joined between our Seed and our Series A (in rough order):

You’ll notice a few things:

  1. Our team is almost entirely 1st-degree connections from places like MIT, Facebook, & Dropbox.
  2. Our founding team is incredibly talented and experienced.
  3. The folks who were 2nd-degree connections were connected to us via strong connector nodes.

What won’t be immediately obvious to you is the thousands of hours we spent with hundreds of candidates from our network we weren’t able to hire. A few weren’t a good fit. But most didn’t want to join our small startup. This is why spending time 4. Nurturing passive talent from your network is critical.

Next Steps


<aside> 🏠 Back ← Back to home here ← 2. Finding & reaching out to candidates here

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<aside> ➡️ Next Up → 3. The initial sell conversation here → Skip ahead to nurturing passive talent here

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Feedback? Suggestions? Ideas? Comment directly or email [email protected]