Selling while you hire

The founder as chief recruiter

When someone joins a startup, they’re taking a leap of faith in the founder. Your ability to articulate vision, conviction, and care will determine whether top talent joins or walks. Every conversation is an opportunity to inspire confidence. Treat it as such.

At the Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A stages, you are the brand. Candidates don’t know your company. They know you.

How to sell the opportunity

Start with “why you”

• Share your story. Why did you start this company?
• What problem obsessed you enough to leave everything else behind?

Paint the “why now”

• What inflection point makes this moment possible?
• Great founders make the timing feel urgent and inevitable.

Make it personal

• Talk about career trajectories, not just job descriptions.
• Show how the candidate’s unique skills will matter to the company’s future.
  

FOUNDER STORY: AppDynamics
When Jyoti Bansal recruited his first engineers, he didn’t sell them a company — he sold them a problem. He described how the rise of distributed systems would break traditional performance tools. “We can fix this,” he’d say. “And if we do, every engineer in the world will thank us.” That vision closed candidates who later built one of the most valuable enterprise startups of the decade.

CHECKLIST: Selling while you hire

• Share your founding story.
• Communicate your conviction and market timing.
• Outline the candidate’s career growth within your company.
• Be transparent about funding, burn, and runway.
• Have every interviewer “sell” why they joined.
  

PRO TIP: Don’t fake perfection because authenticity builds trust. Be honest about challenges and explain why you’re confident you’ll overcome them.