How To Hire Elite Software Developers For Your Startup
StartX is the community for Stanford University’s top entrepreneurs. In our eight year history, we’ve supported 1300 founders and 600 companies. A large portion of my job at StartX is to advise startups as they grow and to help connect them with experts in our community. I try to guide them and help them make smart decisions. One of my biggest challenges is assisting startups to find the talent they need to turn ideas in products.
We have a diverse community at StartX, it spans industries, stages and founder backgrounds, but the one thing all of these 600 companies have had in common is they need talent! Here in Silicon Valley, companies rely on exceptional talented software developers to help build products. The best performing software developers are up to 800% more productive than mediocre developers. That is a large amount of runway a startup can save by finding a high performing developer.
Silicon Valley has a talent shortage. Startups are not going to solve this problem by merely hiring among friends. Most of their friends probably work at Google or Apple, and trying to lure them away to work for your (smaller by comparison) company is a losing proposition. Even if you manage to steal a friend away, the costs associated with hiring and keeping them can kill the company. I see this very real problem plague many StartX founders in our community. For our founders to succeed, they need to scale their companies by building teams of talented people.
We accepted Turing into the StartX community because of how passionate founders Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan are about solving this problem; allowing companies to deploy the world’s talent with a touch of a button. Turing is their second company together, Rover (acquired by Revcontent) being their first, and they represent the growing demographic of serial entrepreneurs choosing StartX. Our associated investment fund, the Stanford-StartX Fund invested in Turing in hopes they will solve the problem for all of us.
Turing customers can push a button and hire a pre-vetted remote engineer. Companies can elastically scale their talent needs as effortlessly as cloud computing on AWS. In turn, Turing empowers exceptional developers all over the world to participate in Silicon Valley.
By allowing companies to tap into the global pool of elite developers instantly, Turing accelerates scaling, reduces burn rate, maintains runway, and empowers the whole community to achieve more- exactly what every investor ever hopes.
Having founded a company together before, Jonathan and Vijay have lived the problem they are solving with Turing. StartX is a community for founders committed to solving big problems like this. Their authenticity and humbleness is inspiring to see. We are excited to have them in the community, to have invested in Turing, and to see how they can help the other great companies at StartX find top talent!
