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Hiring Insights & Building in Public
John Apolinar
March 19, 2025
Words of wisdom we’ve found from Founders, VC’s and Investors.
Here’s this weeks top 5:
#1
if you're reading this, you're a startup founder
— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg)
1:00 PM • Jan 24, 2025
Amazing cheat sheet on ai tools to help a busy Founder with a ton of different aspects of a Startup. Bookmark this one!
#2
The most misunderstood purchase of all time:
Mark Zuckerberg spent $2 BILLION on a VR company that hadn't sold a single product.
The tech industry laughed. But Zuck's real plan was more brilliant than anyone realized...
Here's the full story🧵
— Tim Carden (@timjcarden)
5:03 PM • Nov 26, 2024
I love Founder stories. Love him or hate him, Zuck is one of the most well known Founders of our generation.
I’ll leave it to you to dive into all the great wisdom in this post, but one ket point is post building in public is essentially free, gives you full audience control, and benefits from compound network effects. But the real goldmine? Trust at scale.
Your brand isn’t just about reach; it’s about credibility. Virality means nothing if people don’t trust you.
#3
Actual numbers on what it took a seed-stage startup to hire their first two founding backend engineers (full-remote)
It's good to know as a candidate: this is the type of competition you might have. And as a founder: this is how much time investment it can take to make a hire
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz)
10:43 AM • Mar 8, 2025
This is nuts. Either the backend engineering pool is pretty saturated or it’s just THAT hard to find the ones that are fits to be on the founding team.
I dug through the comments and it sounds like this is about normal for what Founders are up against. Question is will AI make this challenge worse? If so, sounds like a good business opportunity for someone out there 👀
#4
Rohini Pandhi (@rohinip) is head of product expansion at @mercury, spent seven years at @Square (now called @blocks), and is co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective.
In our conversation, Rohini shares:
🔸 How to build your early PM team
🔸 How to attract top PM… x.com/i/web/status/1…— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan)
6:50 PM • Jan 12, 2025
Wow. Rohini is impressive. From Square to Mercury, juggling multiple products at each startup at the same time.
Really good insight to how valuable Product Managers are for startups. If you have the time, give this a watch. She goes in depth on how to hire a great product team!
#5
Mom is always ahead of the curve 😂