The Chapter One Founder Experience

The rationale for doubling down on Founder Experience stems from our firm’s thesis that, when founders raise money, there are two things that every team needs:

1. Help with hiring

2. Customer intros and partnership support

Jeff Morris, Jr., our founder and managing partner, says “If you can do those two things well, you will be better than 90% of funds.”

We understand and value the journey a founder must go on from ideation to building and securing funding to realizing their vision. And on the talent side, one of the most difficult parts of this journey, especially for an early-stage company, is convincing top talent to manage their own risk appetite and join what is likely an unproven brand with limited resources to help bring this vision to light.

For an early-stage company, it’s the team and these relationships that determines whether a company ultimately succeeds or not.

That’s where we come in. Let’s take a look at how we’re approaching hiring for our companies. In today’s piece, Greg will provide an inside look into the thought-process we walk through with our founders as they kick off their talent searches and list out some ways that we proactively and opportunistically support our founders.

Talent matters.

I’m not going to use this space to talk about why talent matters and how critical it is to get it right at an early-stage company (for further reading on that topic, check out Steve Bartel’s Notion page titled Startup Hiring 101), but rather provide some color into how we support our founders on the talent front.

In the first conversation I have with founders, and prior to explaining how we will work with them, I start by asking what sort of talent support they’ve received from other venture funds. Responses run the gamut from having no support on the talent side¹, to having profiles passed to the team (whether vetted or unvetted), to providing direct requisition-based hiring support (but generally only when prompted, very rarely is anyone proactive about this). Most support does seem to fall in the “none-to-very-little” spectrum while likely suggesting specific recruiting agencies (especially common for executive hiring) for more hands-on support.

Where does Chapter One differ? 

I’ve been using this analogy for five years, so forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before, but my goal is not necessarily to do all the sourcing and hiring directly for our portfolio companies - logically, it’s not scalable for the entire portfolio - but rather to teach them to fish and augment their internal processes so that they can become their own talent beacon.

Does that mean I’m not fishing? Of course not 😃 

In fact, most recruiters I talk to today - many former colleagues of mine wanting to know more about the glamorous VC recruiting life - are surprised to hear that I spend the majority of my time actively sourcing candidates.

Is this scalable for each and every hire in the portfolio? As cited above, absolutely not. But do we sit alongside our founders, show them our process, assist with top-of-funnel, calibrate on candidates, and help kickstart their pipeline when needs are most critical? Absolutely.

I stated in the introduction post that I dislike the term “recruiter” because of the connotation that far too many unscrupulous people have given to my industry. Rather, I want our founders to see us as strategic advisors who can assist with taking the lift around talent off their shoulders so they can go back to doing what they do best - building. Thus what I do on my end is not role-taking a laundry-list of requirements, retreating back to being heads-down, and sending whatever candidates come across my desk. It’s working collaboratively with the portfolio to identify as early as possible who may be the proper match for them so that we don’t constantly have to recalibrate and the burden of context-switching from founder-to-builder-to-recruiter can be alleviated.

Easy-to-implement ways to be more proactive:

Being a founder, responsible for building an entire company, can make you feel like Atlas - carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. At Chapter One, our post-investment support team is here to make sure our founders are not carrying this weight alone.

What are ways that we’ve been taking this lift off their shoulders? And how are we proactive about this rather than being order-takers and role-fillers?

Without going into the nitty-gritty details in this entry - this is something we will break down in future posts - in the past year we’ve supported our portfolio companies in a multitude of ways beyond just making introductions to candidates.

I’ll list a few below as I believe these are quick ways to enhance credibility with your portfolio companies/founders (show them you can do this, don’t tell them you can do this) and take the responsibility of recruiting temporarily off their plates:

• Holding hands-on sourcing sessions utilizing Consider, our internal sourcing tool, to provide real-time calibration on high-quality candidates

• Creating hiring templates / interview template loops

• Setting up internal recruiting infrastructure (i.e. what suite of tools make the most sense for the company at a particular stage)

• Writing job descriptions and publicizing said JDs across social media channels

• Writing interview questions and assisting with designing take-home assignments

• Acting as an interviewer on their internal panels (both as a first pass and when they have candidates in final stages)

• Evaluating different recruiting agencies and tools they can use to enhance their own internal talent resources (and subsequently introducing them to specific talent agencies that will be the right fit for them)

• Providing compensation guidelines and guidance into compensation philosophy

One can see from the above bullet points how we lean into being proactive partners versus the stereotypical “reactive recruiter” where one waits until the job is open and starting a search, which puts the onus on the portfolio company and founder (note that I’ve heard horror stories around certain firms whose workflow mandate the founder fill out various forms/”order sheets” before they even begin the recruiting process!).

Most importantly - our approach is strategic where we’re always adding top talent to our ecosystem (this is a plug to remind you to join the Chapter One Talent Network) and helping founders think through what they’re going to need in 3, 6, 12 months while assisting them with building a stronger employer brand to attract this opportunistic talent.

I’ll conclude with a quick note on the above, which will also necessitate a separate post in the future. I continually hammer home the importance of being opportunistic - both to portfolio companies and to candidates during their job search. I’ve honestly placed more people into companies over the last five years for roles that haven’t had an advertised job than I have for “open roles”. By incorporating all of the above into our proactive process, it allows us to have an in-depth understanding of the company’s culture, needs, and future plans so that we can play professional matchmaker with those who we have personally vetted and believe will jibe well with the founders and company’s mission. And is one of the ways we turn our Founder Experience up to 11.

Footnotes:

¹ And this is fine if that’s the expectation! Some stellar firms have simply decided to not build post-investment support teams)