Idea: Y Combinator for Startup Recruiting

Recruiting more college students into startups is a constant topic of discussion.  Just today Fred Wilson mentioned it as one of the critical ingredients for the NYC community.

It always strikes me that more undergraduate hackers go to Wall Street than the startup community.

Maybe we can do something about it, and that's what I want to explore in this blog post...

Y Combinator is a great hack on the world.  It drives $billions of value creation by investing super small amounts.  It’s the ultimate in leverage.  Could college recruiting for startups be similarly hackable?

Well, why do so many students go to Google and Wall Street rather than startups?  It's a complex issue and there are lots of reasons, but here are some of the top ones:

• College students are irrationally risk averse. Instead of paying annual salaries and bonuses, startup upside is captured in option grants that are riskier.  Many of the best college students at MIT are risk averse and think short term. These dispositions are highly cultural.
• Prestige. Startups are missing brand value for parents, relatives, and friends.  This is also highly cultural.
• Too Many Startups / Choice Paradox. Students have no idea how to pick the right startups.  Even if they did, there are an overwhelming number of choices.  This is classic paradox of choice.
• Mismatched Timelines. Startups are often too short-sighted to do college recruiting well, since it takes a long term investment strategy.

Frankly there’s a lot of content and blogs out there about how to start your own company.  And Y Combinator has come around.  That is all very awesome.

But there’s so little content out there about what it’s like to join a startup, or how to join a startup right out of college, etc.

We’re not marketing to our customers very well.

And more broadly there are no concerted efforts to work on this problem.  What could we be doing together to move the needle for the whole community?

We wouldn't need the entire valley to cooperate here; you could do some interesting things just with just a few startups or as a single VC fund.  Here’s what you would do:

1. Start by focusing on getting great interns for startups, and move to full time recruiting later as you learn and iterate.  (Successful internships lead to full time hires anyway.)
   
   
2. Set up an open door application that any student can apply to, much like Y Combinator.  Also like Y Combinator and Startup School, the application should ask high signal, aggressive questions.  Resumes are required but of secondary importance.
   
   
3. Find the applications that you think are promising.  The startups involved will get to browse through the remaining applications to decide who they’re interested in.
   
   
4. Select a very particular breed of startups to participate – specifically startups with meaty internship projects where the company has some momentum and has already shipped their first product.  (The students are the customers here, not the companies.  The long term health of the program will depend mostly on quality of the students’ experiences.)
   
   
5. Try to give students a list of three startups that are interested in them.
   
   
6. If there’s only one startup interested in a student, it probably means you didn’t filter applications heavily enough before having the startups look at them.
   
   
7. If more than three startups want a student I would call that student and coach them through deciding which three startups are most interesting to them.
   
   
8. Fly the student out to meet and interview with each of the three startups.  At this point the student and the startup will already know a lot about each other, so the interviews will be two-way and probably more focused on evaluating culture fit.  Give the students some ideas on how to identify the best startup for them.
   
   
9. While we’re at it, throw in Y Combinator style weekly dinners for the interns, with speakers from the startup ecosystem.

Word of mouth would be hugely important to the long term success of such a program.  Corollaries:

• It'd be helpful to have a brand to leverage from the beginning.  Y Combinator could do it.  Sequoia could do it.  If someone without a brand were to do this they could try to partner with one of these guys.
  
  
• Start with a medium push.  Initial momentum will be important, but so will your long term endurance.
  
  
• Build an alumni network of the students who have been through the program.  They will help each other for years to come.
  
  
• Leverage your alumni network to build awareness at top CS colleges.
  
  
• Make sure the students are blown away every step along the way.  Customer service baby!
  
  
• Be picky about who you accept when it comes to students AND startups.  Pairing a desperate company with a desperate applicant would dilute your brand and wouldn't be worth your time anyway.

So why is this important?

Startups deserve to win the battle for top CS graduates.  These hackers are young; they should be taking risks early in their career.  Their talent would be more leveraged at startups.  They would learn less about bureaucracy and more about creating products and value.

But wait!  It gets better!  …working at a startup can also prepare people for starting their own companies down the road, if they so choose.

Case in point: a few years ago at Xobni we recruited a killer engineer for an internship.  He came to work at Xobni as a full time employee a year later.  After doing some more fantastic work at Xobni, he is now starting his own company, and I think that’s a wonderful cycle to feed.

Comments

[Earbits]

Hey Adam - a friend of mine is leading the charge on this with www.Students4Startups.com

His name is John Shiple, great CTO from Los Angeles. You should connect.

-Joey Flores

[Jason Evanish]

Adam,

Great thoughts. Every startup ecosystem could do better at this.

In Boston, there's an event we're holding (I run a community site called GreenhornConnect and we teamed with a local development firm, thoughtbot) to get developers and designers excited about startups.

http://developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers.org/

I think it has the key ingredients:
- Cool speakers
- Cool technology
- Direct connections to high quality companies

If you're interested in learning more...drop me a line at jason[at]greenhornconnect[dot]com

Thanks,
Jason

[Adam_conrad]

I would argue that college students are justifiably risk averse. 2 words: student. loans. I know I won't feel comfortable doing anything risky until my not-even-bankruptcy-can-break-us-apart loans are paid off. If we didn't have the impending doom of debt on our shoulders, I think we'd be far more open to something like this.

[Jeff Iacono]

Adam, great post. We are aiming to do that with www.collegejobconnect.com. Undergraduate recruiting needs more diversity and a better way for students to connect with a whole host of employers, not just those in consulting, finance, or the big tech companies (although these are great places to work too, I myself went to Wall Street before jumping into startup land). Startups offer a great place to work, you'll likely not a find a place where you'll work harder or learn more.

The overall point is there should be more optionality and more exposure. I'd be happy to chat further, we have some cool stuff going on and I'd like to get your thoughts. In November we generated 50 interview offers to companies that never have the opportunity to recruit on campus. Hit me up at jeff _at_ collegejobconnect _dot_ com

[qna]

I guess somebody is already doing this startup recruiting site now.
:-)

[Tal Safran]

Adam,

I'm an alumnus of the first HackNY Fellowship program in NYC (http://hackny.org). HackNY is addressing these exact issues, "keeping kids off the street (Wall Street)." It's new but fairily well known out here...

The HackNY program offered me and 11 other students jobs at top NYC startups (list here: http://hackny.org/a/2010/06/announcing-the-2010-hackny-fellows), with a sustainable salary and free housing in NYC. I worked at Aviary and was given real responsibilities. Amazing learning experience.

At least once a week, we had pedagogical Ycombinator-style meetings -- a talk on visualization, a meeting at Union Square Ventures with Albert Wenger, a Fred Brooks talk, Chris Dixon, Jonah Peretti, etc. Learned a lot and met tons of great people.

I can't express how great this program was. Very proud to have been of the first class.

For more about HackNY, read here (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703302604575294740285039332.html) or here (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/10/hacknys-student-hackathon)

[Andrew Montalenti]

YCombinator for college interns already exists in NYC. It's called HackNY, http://hackny.org.

My startup -- http://parse.ly -- got an excellent HackNY intern last summer.

It was really simple -- we simply described our startup to the HackNY administrators. They looked at all the HackNY applicants and matched someone who had a background relevant to our startup. In this way, we could get a motivated, talented technologist who is interested in learning about working on a startup, and we wouldn't have to break the bank or waste a lot of time to do it.

I know the reason HackNY gets good interns is precisely because of the reasons you suggest in your article. The selectiveness of the program itself would lend prestige to the internships, thus making it attractive to a much better talent pool. And the combination of mentoring, cohabitation with other like-minded technologists, and special events/programs made it a really great experience for all the HackNY interns.

Finally, as the demo videos -- http://hackny.org/a/2010/08/video-of-the-hackny-summer-2010-demofest/ -- make clear, their work added significant value, not just to our company but to the whole NYC startup ecosystem. A model to replicate elsewhere, if you ask me!

[Blog]

I think this is a big opportunity and it should be AT the schools. The best students at the best schools have aggressively-recruiting companies coming straight to them (with food!)

There's no substitute for in-person interviews, and many more candidates can be covered for the cost this way.

For example, maybe each start-up gets to recruit at three great schools, all under the umbrella of Y Combinator Recruiting.

Also, you can build a relationship with school's recruiting office and professors that can lead to more access, referrals, and an enhanced reputation in future years.

[Dyfy]

I posted that last comment. TypePad's WordPress integration choked on my blog URL http://blog.dylansalisbury.com I guess.

[Nihalmehta]

hackNY FTW. they filtered out tons of candidates and hooked up my startup with the most illustrious hacker ever. can't wait for this year's class!

[Andy Freeman]

> College students are irrationally risk averse. Instead of paying annual salaries and bonuses, startup upside is captured in option grants that are riskier. Many of the best college students at MIT are risk averse and think short term. These dispositions are highly cultural.

MIT students are not representative.

I suspect that you'll find Stanford students are different. However, you're not going to get the ones who can do arithmetic to take below-market salaries because they also understand that the typical option upside is fairly limited unless one is one of the very first few employees. (For example, if we assume a $10/share exit, 100k shares is just $1M. Is your risk-adjusted offer anywhere near that?)

[Maxstoller]

I'm late to the party, but another HackNY alumn here.

"Too Many Startups / Choice Paradox."

As a CS student, I'd argue that there is a deeper issue. Even at NYU, with Foursquare less than a mile or two away, many CS students just don't know that a whole other class of job options exists.

I am glad you touched upon the issues of prestige and risk aversion. I completely agree with you. Chris Dixon spoke about these issues with us: http://twitter.com/#!/maxstoller/status/19039361189.

Luckily, I don't have an Ivy League degree ;).

[Johnclegg]

What you've outlined is definitely on the right track.

We've been running the "Summer of Tech" (formerly Summer of Code New Zealand http://www.summeroftech.co.nz) for 5 years and have had great success. We are an industry led initiative that has have a regional focus on Wellington city not across the country. We currently have over 65 students in over 40 companies and we have expanded to cover 4 "streams" - coding, design, engineering and business analysis.

At Summer of Tech, we focus on upskilling the students and preparing them for internships. We have bootcamps on communications and technical skills. We have developed a number to processes to identify the top student talent and give companies the opportunities to experience the talent first before they hit the market. We work closely with the Universities to ensure that we provide the students with as much opportunities to get infront of smart companies (startups or otherwise).

We have seen enormous benefit for everyone over the last 5 years. We have a number of graduate student alumni that are lead developers at number of startups and some have actually started their own ventures also.

I would definitely recommend that start up communities band together to improve the quality of internships. I have a saying that "I'm on a first name basis with my talent pipeline" that makes a big difference improving the talent pool for the _whole_ market.

John Clegg
Founder - Summer of Tech New Zealand

[Adam Smith]

Thanks for your work on Summer of Tech, John. That sounds like great stuff!!!