Of late, hiring has been a topic that comes up in every conversation with a fellow entrepreneur. It took me some time to think about how we built the Akosha team. I am a first-time, single (non-tech) founder in Delhi who luckily found several super-smart people to join and become co-founders/VPs. Obviously these thoughts reflect my personal experience.

Here are 2-3 interconnected thoughts:

You don’t find the best people, they find you: For some reasons, despite a lot of aggressive hiring efforts (distribute the JDs, use recruitment firms, search on LinkedIn and Naukri, having an elaborate interviewing process etc.), the best hires at Akosha have been people who just came across us, liked the idea and just applied or wrote a mail to me. So, while there is no way to avoid the hard work, finding that really good person (someone who is your equal in terms of passion, intellect and drive) to come and become a pillar of your startup is not really in your hands. So maybe you shouldn’t even go out looking for that kind of a person but concentrate on hiring the other people in the team.

E.g. Vishal, our CTO, was the 109^th person I interviewed for the CTO position but he just randomly came to us because he had a complaint. He saw the position open and just hit reply. I saw his CV, and I knew he was the right guy. Same for our marketing head, Kali. I spoke to so many candidates, but randomly Kali wrote in one day and we moved fast from there. Avinash mailed in with his presentation to me.

So don’t try to find a co-founder/VP level guy. It will just happen. Concentrate on the other things.

Nothing succeeds like success: Traction is by far the most influential reason for us to be able to build the team. It’s a chicken and egg problem and that’s why when you raise money, it doesn’t change things directly – hiring is still difficult and throwing more money at the problem doesn’t solve it. So the thing to do is not to go hiring, but to start using the money to get traction, make sure you tell the world about it and attract great people.  A lot of stuff happens in parallel, but bottom line is to focus on traction and let the best people find you.

They are odd people: We went out for a drinks session with some recent hires, and when they were sufficiently sloshed, we made then tell us the weirdest/funniest stories about themselves. From all the stories/anecdotes, it was obvious that all of them were very odd people (odd as in they had done things in a way in their past life which “normal” people rarely do). One guy ran away from home after 12^th to pursue life in another city; one guy had hitchhiked from Amsterdam to Paris when he was 19 (and claims that there was a threesome on in the car as well); one woman decided to break her engagement 10 days before her arranged marriage to marry someone she loved; another one from a conservative Hindu family/city, married a Muslim boy; one IIT guy had found innovative ways of coping up with English medium education after studying in Hindi medium till 9^th; one guy collaborated with his dad with make his grandfather believe that his love marriage was in fact an arranged one etc. etc. As stories pored out, it showed that all these people had thought independently, been impulsive, taken risks and followed their guts at some point(s) of their lives.

I don’t think it is easy to check for this oddness during a formal interviewing process but I think there is something in these people that leads them to work with startups and give founders a chance. Maybe you can get potential hires (who have cleared a couple of interview rounds) to meet informally outside office and get them to share their life stories.

All in all, working with the smart people gives the most amount of satisfaction to me; but it has taken quite a while to get all those people to join.