How To Hire A Great Tech Team: Tips For AI Startup Founders And Investors

Jason Schoettler is co-founder and managing partner of Calibrate Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in visionary entrepreneurs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation companies all have one thing in common: They need to hire talented engineers to build the cutting-edge software and hardware systems that power their products.

As a startup founder, hiring and growing a technology team — data scientists, robotics engineers and software developers — is a continuous and critical challenge. Get it right and your company grows and prospers; struggle to find the right talent and your company will languish. To make matters worse, the labor market is tighter than ever, making it one of the most difficult (and expensive) times to hire tech talent that I’ve witnessed in 20 years of investing in startups. 

So, what concrete steps can founders take to ensure they’re attracting and retaining the best technical talent? How can automation startups compete for top engineers when they’re going up against huge companies with deep pockets? And how can investors ensure the automation companies they fund make strategic hiring decisions that fuel growth without burning through the majority of their capital to pay salaries alone?

I don’t purport to have all the answers to these pressing questions, but after investing in automation companies for the last two decades, I have a few insights I hope might be helpful to entrepreneurs and investors. 

Start With A Compelling And Positive Mission

The tech whizzes who build robots aren’t robots; they’re human beings who, like all of us, want to work for companies with a vision to make the world a better place. The first step in hiring great tech talent is to be an inspiring company. If your only goal is to make money, go public or get acquired, you’ll have a tough time attracting engineers. After all, they went into engineering because they enjoy working on exciting projects that challenge them and put their problem-solving talents to the test. Builders at heart, they want to be part of a team of creative, collaborative peers.

So, before you set out to hire the world’s best technical team, think long and hard about what your company stands for, why you’re building your particular product, what problem it solves and why your approach is the most creative, innovative and exciting. Write a clear mission statement that encapsulates your company’s vision.

A few automation companies that have done a great job of defining their world-changing goals are FarmWise, which aims to eliminate toxic chemicals from farm fields and improve working conditions for laborers, HealthTensor, whose AI software aims to improve medical diagnoses to improve patient outcomes and save lives and Heliogen, which is using concentrated sunlight in an effort to replace fossil fuels. (Full disclosure: Calibrate Ventures has invested in FarmWise and HealthTensor.)

Communicate Your Vision And Build Trust Among Developers

Once you crystalize your mission, you must find ways to communicate this bold vision to the technical community. To get the word out about your company and the world-changing products you’re building, you’ll have to go where developers are and speak their language.

Consider writing blog posts geared toward engineers, posting articles on HackerNews, doing PR outreach to reporters at publications developers read, interacting with developers on social media and message boards, hosting hackathons and conferences, contributing to open source projects aligned with your mission and more. When you foster trust among developers through useful, meaningful content and interaction, they will have a favorable opinion of your company when it comes time to hire. FormLabs is an automation company that has done a great job of telling its story and fostering “developer love.”

Hire To Hire

When it comes to hiring technical teams, when you hire one engineer, you get a pipeline to several or many more. Engineers will tell their friends, colleagues and collaborators about the company and bring more great talent on board. That’s why it’s critical to make strategic early hires, signing engineers who truly believe in your vision.

I would also argue that one of your earliest non-technical hires should be an HR person, and this person should be excited about the company’s vision, be tech-savvy and clearly understand what makes your product special from a technical perspective.

Third-party recruiters can be very helpful, especially in today’s tough labor market, but make sure any recruitment partners you engage fully understand your company’s mission and always interact with developers in a way that reflects your values. Too often, recruiters can’t clearly communicate what’s unique or special about a company or they don’t understand the developer mindset. Great salaries and perks are always welcome, but many engineers may value creative, collaborative, exciting workplaces over higher compensation.

Hiring technical talent is never going to be without challenges, but if founders start with these three basic principles, attracting top engineers can be slightly easier. And once you build a core tech team within your organization, your talent flywheel will begin turning as your team recruits among their friends and collaborators.

Engineers are the very core of any automation company; take the right steps to hire the best and the brightest early on and you’ll be set up for long-term growth and success.

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