Hiring Your Start-up’s First Employee

the thing a lot of these articles don't talk about is how to attract these employees to your startup in particular, because the class of person a startup wants to hire, can get hired by a lot of other startups too.

two factors, I think:

1. invest significant effort in networking in your local tech community. why should I want to work with you? how do I know you understand technology? speak at conferences and meetups, show up at hack nights, interact with the local talent so they can get to know you, and when they decide to switch jobs, they will approach you.

2. pick an interesting business with interesting tech. All engineers good and bad exist on a spectrum of value. The harder your technical problems, the more you need the very best engineers. If your problem is mostly not technical, you don't need as many rockstars, and they don't have to be quite as strong.

there was a recent YC job post for a "recruiting engineer" which made me groan inside. Your best engineers are the only ones who can attract other best-of-class engineers. typical recruiters, of course, are out of the question.

No talk of equity?

You'd be an idiot to join as the first employee and not get 100/N percent of the company.

In other words, consider yourself a cofounder. Not the first employee.