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
Here’s our founding team of eight Gems that joined between our Seed and our Series A (in rough order):
- Drew Regitsky — founding engineer, 1st-degree, a classmate from MIT
- Jet Zhou — founding engineer, 1st-degree, a classmate from MIT
- Jacob Hurwitz — founding engineer, 1st-degree, former coworker @ Dropbox
- Alex Rubin — founding engineer, 1st-degree, former coworker @ Dropbox & referral from Jacob Hurwitz
- Joe Totten — founding sales team, 2nd-degree via John Jersin (advisor to Gem)
- Einas Haddad — founding engineer, 2nd-degree via Neha Batra (a classmate from MIT)
- Mike Pinkowish — founding engineer (currently Head of Engineering), 1st-degree, former coworker @ Facebook
- Dan Cohen — founding sales team, 1st-degree, a referral from Joe Totten
You’ll notice a few things:
- Our team is almost entirely 1st-degree connections from places like MIT, Facebook, & Dropbox.
- Our founding team is incredibly talented and experienced.
- Our founding team helped us grow from $100k ARR → $1M ARR in less than a year and we wouldn’t be here today without them.
- Bringing on great people helped us hire more great people (you see several referrals within the founding team).
- Hiring a great founding team helped us triple our team the next year and triple the following year again.
- 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
Next Steps
Feedback? Suggestions? Ideas? Comment directly or email steve@gem.com