Building An In-House or Remote Engineering Team: Suggestions from Wayfund Founders at Early-Stage Start-Ups

Author: Satta Sarmah Hightower and Lauren Taylor.

Last year, nearly 4,200 startups were founded, carrying with them the founders’ hopes they could create a game-changing product that would revolutionize their industry. 

Building a successful tech company requires two key ingredients: resilience and talent. However, the latter may be the most difficult because finding the right engineering talent requires a mix of luck and a whole lot of time. 

Founders in Boston, which is currently home to hundreds of early-stage companies, are tackling this challenge in several ways, proving there’s no one-size-fits all model for building a good engineering team. Here’s how some startups do it, and what you can learn from them.

Navigating Engineering Hiring at an Early-Stage Tech Company is Challenging

Competing for engineering talent with large, better-resourced companies who can offer higher salaries and more perks is one of the biggest challenges for startups. So is understanding their tech stack requirements. Early-stage companies must know what they’re looking for in terms of their tech support needs, whether that means finding an engineer who has experience with emerging technologies, a specific coding language or working in a DevOps environment.

“I feel like it's a common theme that hiring engineers at an early stage startup when you're a dozen or so people is really hard because the life cycle of early stage startups is tenuous. You're basically raising money every year or two, and because you have that limited budget and that sense of a limited life span, you don't have as much budget to compete with a big firm like Google, or even locally, Wayfair,” says Mike Festa, a Wayfair alum and founder of 3XR, a company based in Wakefield, Mass. that helps brands create immersive, augmented reality-enabled 3D content. 

Though they can’t compete on salary, early-stage companies can compete on experience. It’s crucial for them to lean into what they can uniquely offer engineering talent, such as the chance to grow more quickly and develop their skill set and incentives like a potential equity stake. Being transparent about your company’s financials also can help potential candidates better assess their risk of joining at an early stage.

“What I try to sell is that this is going to be a very good experience, you’re going to get a lot of autonomy and have a lot of impact,” says Wes Abbey, co-founder of Boston-based Wonderment, a recurring commerce platform for e-commerce merchants.

Festa says a key part of that impact is the ability to shape the direction of the company and the future success of the business.

“We definitely ask a lot [of our early-stage employees] and the exchange is that you get to be a meaningful change agent in an organization that hopefully grows into something big,” he says. 

Finding the Right Talent, and the Right Skills to Help Your Business Thrive

Founders at early-stage companies are tapping their networks and leveraging second-level connections (i.e. a friend of a friend) to find great tech talent. They’re recruiting engineers based on their technical skills and knowledge of different programming languages, but soft skills are just as important, says Tameem Hourani, principal at Boston-based RapDev.io, which helps businesses of all sizes transform into DevOps organizations.

“Finding good engineers isn’t as hard as finding good engineers with a great attitude. That is much more challenging,” he says.

Hourani says it’s crucial to find engineers who have a willingness to learn and collaborate and who are able to clearly communicate technical information to non-technical business users to build buy-in with other key stakeholders within the company.

“Knowing that someone is willing to work through problems or issues, that's the type of attitude that for me is the most important thing,” Hourani says. 

However, technical skills still rank high. Beyond coding ability, early-stage founders say they really need engineers who have capabilities across many different technical areas. 

“In a small startup, you need people that are Jack of all trades. They need to be able to go in and diagnose a networking issue just as well as they can go and debug code versus building out roadmaps and plans,” Festa says. “So, you need to have a high-level tactical appreciation for ‘this is the direction we're going with the product,’ but also a low level ‘I can go in and actually code the thing myself.” 

Contractors vs. Full-Timers: Sourcing Talent for Your Early-Stage Company

One calculation early-stage companies need to make that their big tech counterparts often don’t is whether to hire full-time employees or contractors in the beginning stages.

Contractors may be frowned upon at bigger companies, because they have name recognition and the resources to find and hire top full-time talent. However, contractors can give early-stage companies more flexibility to scale up or down depending on their business needs, funding and cash flow. Hourani says hiring contractors is a good way to start, especially for bootstrapped companies. However, Abbey says it all depends on your company’s needs.

“My first reaction is not to go out and find contractors, especially in the beginning, unless you don’t have a technical founder,” Abbey says. “They can just be very expensive and they're also not going to be a main part of your business. But I've also heard a lot of positive things. When you really need to get going, it’s usually a good source for finding people who are talented and who know how to do the job.”

Being in the Boston market, founders have an advantage in that they can access quality talent — even if it’s on an interim basis if they can’t yet afford to hire a full-time engineer. The huge college population also gives early-stage companies looking for junior engineers another potential advantage, because your company either can consider contract-to-hire arrangements to access experienced engineers or make the investment to hire a junior engineer who is just beginning their career and may want to grow with the company. 

The best approach will vary by company, but if your company is building its product and proof of concept, you might be able to delay hiring full-timers until you have a clearer product roadmap and vision. After that, you can make the investment to hire the right people.

Ryan Durkin, founder and CEO of The Operators, a company that provides access to the top 1% of tech talent in Boston, says it’s crucial for early-stage companies to have at least one senior technical person on their team once they figure out their product roadmap.

“If you're a non-technical founder building a tech company, I'm a strong believer that you should spend the time to find a technical co-founder. The reason? It's a tech company. I would equate it to a person looking to open a hair salon and not partnering with a hair stylist to found it. Can it be done? Sure. Is it something I would want for my business. No.” Durkin says. “You need the role expertise to increase the probability of success and scale smart. Then, put them in the driver seat as to whether to build 100% internally, whether to outsource, or whether to do a combo of the two. I’ve seen a much larger number of companies going with a combination of the two and having massive success. With remote work now at the forefront, that obviously is accelerating that hybrid model.” 

“Tech is… technical. I've simply seen too many startups outsource from the start, skipping the technical cofounder search — because let's admit it, it's really hard — only to then look back a year later having spent $50,000 to $200,000 on an outsourced product that ultimately ends up being rebuilt by your internal engineers when you do start hiring anyway. Wasted dollars. Wasted time. I see it all the time. Find the tech cofounder, and then pursue one of the three paths I mentioned. You’ll be thankful you did."

A Roadmap for Building Your Team

Building a great team is the foundation for success at any company. 

Early-stage companies in Boston have several unique considerations as they navigate the hiring process, but the current environment and being in Boston’s talent-rich market may give them a leg up.

For one, the pandemic has made remote work the norm. This gives early-stage companies access to a wider talent pool, including college students in Boston and elsewhere who may be looking for remote internships and skilled engineers who are making a mass exodus from more expensive tech hubs like New York City and Silicon Valley. 

While finding the right technical talent is crucial, don’t forget about soft skills, too. While you want an engineer with technical knowledge, they also must be collaborative and able to communicate effectively with other parts of the business. Knowing Java or Python alone isn’t enough to build a lasting tech company. We often talk about product-market fit, and that’s not only true from a technology perspective. Finding the right engineering talent can make all the difference between building a team that creates the next unicorn — or one that becomes a cautionary tale for future startups. 

Wayfund is a group of current and past Wayfairians investing in other Wayfairians that are launching high-growth tech companies.  Visit Wayfund.co to learn more about the mission and opportunities for involvement.