Finding your next role: Tips from YC's Talent team

[Music] foreign [Music] And with that, let's go ahead and get started. I'm Andy, like Paige mentioned.

Um, to give you guys just a quick background about myself, I've been recruiting almost for 10 years now. It's kind of crazy to think, but I started my career at Palantir. Um, I was there for four years, and then I moved to a company called Affirm, where I started as the second technical recruiter. I was there for about four and a half years and focused mostly on engineering hiring, and then eventually leading the technical Talent function.

Um, and now I've been at YC Continuity supporting Founders, um, specifically on technical hiring for about four, almost five months now. So it's nice to meet everyone here. Awesome!

And I am Heather. I actually started my career in a bit of a different field in social work in San Francisco, which I was new to the city at that time. Uh, and it was the first time I had really been exposed to the tech scene. So after a few years of doing social work, I actually decided to do a bit of a career shift, as you can likely tell, and joined a recruiting agency called Bets Recruiting, where I partnered with a lot of different tech startups across the US to help build out their go-to-market teams.

I did that for about two years and then moved in-house and joined Stripe. I was there for about six and a half years for a very wild and exciting ride. I joined when they were about 300 employees, and I was the fourth business recruiter, business and GNA recruiter on the team. In about a year after joining, I moved into management and was responsible for overseeing both the business and GNA functions for the Americas until I left back in April of this year.

And I've also been at YC for about five months now. I joined the talent team here and am working with Founders, focused primarily on go-to-market and GNA exec talent. Awesome! Thank you both for joining us.

And for those of you who don't know, uh, Y Combinator is a startup accelerator. Um, so every year we have two batches of startups where we give them 500K, and then they go through a three-month program where they learn about the fundamentals of starting a business. We also have additional functions that Heather is going to tell us about, and I want to kind of frame who they are before we dive into why you're really here.

Heather: Yes, so we are part of the YC Continuity team specifically, or as we refer to it, YCC, which is basically YC's later stage investment fund. We are investing in the top one percent of YC batch companies. We've had about just over 4,500 companies that have gone through our batch program, and through our growth stage fund, we've reinvested in about 40 of those.

Uh, and we typically invest in companies that are around Series B or later. We've done some pre-Series Bs as well, but Series B tends to be our sweet spot, uh, who are really kind of hitting the accelerator on growth from both a business and talent perspective.

Uh, and then I will say that we don't just invest in these companies, but we're pretty embedded with our Founders and provide support to them as they scale their organization through a lot of different programs that we run, uh, working with our investment team on overall business strategy and then the talent team, which Andy and I are both on, where we are really focused on helping Founders on anything related to talent, people, and helping them really build out their executive bench as well.

And for a little bit more context, could you share what your day-to-day looks like? You kind of went into it already, but I'd love to hear more.

Andy: Yeah, I'll give a just a really quick overview. Um, just for everyone here, context-wise, our day-to-day looks very different from being an in-house recruiter. Um, being an inside recruiter, our main focus is to really focus on that specific company and bringing candidates, employees into that specific company.

Here at YCC, like Heather mentioned, we support many different Founders at any given time in all different sizes and stages. For example, Stripe is actually in our portfolio, but we also have companies that are much ea...