Your founding engineer, found.

We source, run the first deep technical round, and send you only the ones who cleared it, each with a written read. We’re not recruiters. We’re ex-founders and founding engineers who’ve hired hundreds of these people.

$5,000 · six weeks · unlimited roles

How it runs

Six weeks, start to signed.

Week 1
The brief
We get the role, the bar, the comp and equity band, and what you’ve already tried. Outreach starts by day three.
Weeks 2–4
The first round
We run the first round: technical depth and startup fit. The ones who pass land on your calendar.
Weeks 5–6
The close
Finals, offer, signature. If nobody’s signed by week six we keep going until someone does. No extra charge.

What you get back

What a read looks like.

After every first round you get a written read on the candidate, the same day. See an example below.

Ashley Wong

Sr. Software Engineer · 7 years experience

Yeswith one reservation

Overview

Built the first version of a B2B scheduling product alone over four months, then brought on two engineers and shipped it to paying customers. The timeline held up under questioning, and two of the customers they named are on the company’s site.

Questions we asked and responses

What did you own, end to end?: All of the first version: the data model, the API, and the web app. Two engineers joined in month four and they handed off the front end.
What broke first once real customers were on it?: Calendar sync drifted after a timezone change and a customer missed a meeting. They walked us through how they found it, the patch that shipped that night, and the proper fix that took a week.
What did you cut to ship in four months?: Listed the cuts in order (no mobile, no permissions, a manual import instead of an integration) and said which one they regretted. The manual import. It cost them a customer.

What gave us reservations

Testing. When we asked how they knew the sync fix actually worked, the answer was “we watched it for a week.” No test, no alert. That’s fine at a hundred customers and it isn’t at ten thousand. When we pushed, they agreed rather than defended it, which is the better sign.

What to ask them

Ask them to redesign the sync so the timezone bug can’t happen again, out loud, on a whiteboard. We’d hire them if they reach for the data model before they reach for a retry loop.

What it costs

$5,000. Not per role.

An agency would charge about $25,000 for one founding engineer. Ours is a flat, one-time fee, and it covers everyone you’re hiring this sprint.

The sprint

$5,000six weeks

We find, screen, and run the first technical round for your founding engineers and designers, however many you’re hiring. You meet the ones who cleared it, each with a written read.

Not signed by week six? We keep going. No extra charge.
No percentage, no extra fees.

Before you start

Don’t hire us if…

You’re hiring sales, ops, or anything that isn’t the founding team.

We can’t judge those properly, so we don’t take them.

You need a hundred names by Friday.

There are tools for that. This isn’t one.

Start a sprint

Six weeks from now you’ve hired them, or you’ve stopped paying us.

Two minutes of questions. We reply the same day with whether we’d take the sprint and when it could start.