I need your help in curating the best team at HiHello

From having built and invested in companies for over 25 years now, I know that the only deterministic ingredient for a company to become successful is to build an awesome team. It all comes down to people: people who are smart, humble, eager to learn, eager to grow, have high IQ and high EQ. 

I fundamentally believe that who you know is often more important than what you know. This is the premise of HiHello. And that premise will also be put to test in this email. I know you, and you know some awesome people, and it is through these connections that I’m hoping to find some amazing people to join my team at HiHello. 

We’re currently an 8-person team, and I expect to double our size in the next few months. The early hires at the company will all be working directly with me. I am based in Palo Alto, CA, but HiHello is a remote-first company (we’ve been that way since before COVID). We’re open to hiring people either in remote locations (the constraint is to work in continental US time zones ET-PT) or here in the Bay Area. Of course, each role comes with an equity position in the company as well.

While I value experience in some roles (design, product management in particular), I also recognize that talent isn’t always a function of years. I would love to chat with anyone that you would recommend (students, alumni, friends, former colleagues, former employees, or anyone in your network that you think highly of for these roles) and would appreciate it if you could help circulate this around on the appropriate forums and lists or in your network. I promise that I will be engaging personally with anyone who reaches out with your reference or with reference to this email.

Here are the roles I’m looking for amazing people for:

Product Designer: Someone who has a unicorn-like blend of design, marketing, and business. Who can think about user flows, wireframe them, convert them into visually beautiful prototypes and then think through and iterate all the different ways in which a user may interpret/use the product. My driving belief here is that design is a language of communication: can you use the design to anticipate what the user wants to do and guide them to the appropriate next step to achieve that goal. This person should dream in Figma and can work with me in real-time to do wireframes and mockups and take the half-baked ideas in my head and convert them into something beautiful and elegant.

Product Manager: Someone who is the master of seeing the big picture but being able to zoom into the minutest detail and address it with impeccable attention. This person will be directing the efforts of most of our team by listening to customer feedback, sales feedback, and support feedback. They will be synthesizing that information into what our users want, but then also keeping in mind what direction we plan to go in as a company, and capture all of this information in one place. They will then boil down this information into what tasks need to be completed on a weekly basis and allocate these tasks to the limited, but amazingly talented people we have on our team. This person should have some prior experience of managing projects and teams. Making decisions quickly is an important skill for this role and making those decisions in a way that people can then predict future decisions is masterful.

Backend Engineer: Someone with incredibly strong computer science fundamentals, who understands data structure, and data modeling for flexibility and performance. Someone who can not only think about how to make something work today, but can think ahead to what we may evolve into tomorrow by constructing a scalable, performant, and modern solution. We use APIs and we want our APIs to be logical and well designed so that other engineers have a delightful experience using them, yet also be performant so our users have a delightful experience using the product. From a tech stack perspective, we currently are using node.js and TypeScript, so the tech here is not that hard to learn, but knowing how to pull together various APIs, build infrastructure on Google Cloud and AWS, knowledge of GraphQL, authentication, security, and just overall awesomeness is key :)

Mobile Engineer: After two years of building apps in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, we’re in the midst of making a platform shift to React Native. I’m looking for someone who is a mobile-native -- they grew up using modern apps and understand how they are built and how they can be made to perform well. Someone who prides themselves on how quickly they can build features in React and ship them out to hundreds of thousands of users in minutes/hours! Having a deep knowledge of Android or iOS fundamentals would be a big help in this role, but it’s primarily a React Native role focused on delivering a unified and delightful app experience on iOS and Android. Our apps currently have a 4.8-star rating with over 2K reviews. That’s good, but not good enough. I know we can do better and I want someone who prides themselves on building fluid, beautiful mobile experiences.

Frontend Engineer: Someone who can use React, Typescript, and modern web technologies to craft beautiful experiences on the desktop web and mobile web. In a lot of ways this is a complement/analog to the Mobile Engineer role above. We just have enough stuff that we want to build that we need additional people on the team to be able to deliver those experiences both on the Web and on mobile.

Marketing: We have a product people love. We’ve seen this in the reviews and we hear it from users every day. But, Ralph Waldo Emerson was wrong when he said “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” Even if we build the best product, if people don’t know about it, they’re not going to beat a path to your door. We’re looking for someone to join our marketing team and help us to spread the word about HiHello. Someone who can be creative, full of fresh ideas, but then also be able to critically evaluate those ideas and execute on them. Whether it is social media, content marketing, ASO, SEO, video production -- they’ll get to use existing skills and learn new skills.

I truly and dearly appreciate your help in connecting me to amazing people.

Thank you 🙏🏽

-Manu