Harj Taggar - How Startups can Compete with FAANG Companies when Hiring Employees

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Hey everyone, I'm Harj. I'm a partner at Y Combinator, and I'm gonna answer the question of how do I hire someone who has competing offers from the big tech companies.

There's two ways I think you can compete with someone who has an offer from a FANG company. The first is on just process. So, if you've ever received an offer from Facebook, Apple, or Google, or any of these big tech companies, it can take weeks for you to go from having an initial call to scheduling an interview, to hearing back on if you got the offer or not, to even getting the offer details, getting a formal offer letter. This process can actually end up taking longer than a month.

As a startup, you have the advantage of speed. One thing I've seen a lot of startups do really well is when they find someone who's really great, they move really quickly. So at my startup, Triplebyte, we would often call the person at the end of the day and let them know straight away we thought they were really awesome and that we would have the offer details over to them ASAP, usually by the following morning. We were available to talk through all of those details, answer any questions they had, and generally just be moving really quickly.

So that's the first thing, and that really impresses people. Because one of the big fears of someone who's ambitious, and has an offer from joining a big tech company, is that things are gonna be really slow moving, that there'll be too much bureaucracy to actually get things shipped, that they'll feel like a cog in the wheel. You can confirm that suspicion by comparing how slowly these big tech companies move to just give them a basic offer with your own blazing fast startup speed at getting them an offer and making them feel loved.

So that's just the first table stakes. It's really, really low hanging fruit to start competing with the big tech companies.

The second thing is when you're talking through sort of career options or convincing someone to join your startup, really give them a lot of individualized, personalized attention from multiple members of the team. Something we would do at Triplebyte quite a lot is I'd ask everyone who had interacted with that candidate during the day, whether it was at lunch or whether they'd interviewed them, to reach out with a personalized follow-up email that included one thing they really liked about the person or what interaction they had, and telling them they really hoped they would join.

Being available for calls and answering their questions about the company—that's the kind of thing that just doesn't happen when you interview at Apple or Google. It again goes to show that candidate that this is a special culture, that they're going to feel more valued and more like a real member of the team than if they go and join one of these giant tech conglomerates.

The next thing I suggest you talk about with them is how often big companies end up shutting down projects that people have worked on for quite a while. I have multiple friends who ended up joining a big tech company, and they spent a year working really, really hard on a project they were really excited about, only for it to be cancelled at the last minute. There's nothing that frustrates good people more than feeling they wasted their time and energies on something.

So, make sure you emphasize to this candidate that a startup doesn't have time to work on projects that get shut down—like everything they do from day one is going to directly impact real users and real customers. That's a really satisfying feeling. This works really great if you can find someone who's a friend or someone in your network who had the same experience of working at a big company, having a project cancelled, and put them on the phone with this person to viscerally communicate how painful that experience is.

Okay, so to sum up, if you're trying to hire a great person who has competing offers from a FANG company, make sure you move really quickly to give them the offer and answer all their questions so they can see just how much faster a startup moves than a big tech company. Make sure you follow up with them personally and ask everyone on your team to send them a personalized follow-up email.

And third, emphasize how big companies often shut down projects and have lots of wasted effort, which can be really demotivating, whereas startups always work on things that directly impact their users.