Philipp Moehring

Category: Entrepreneurship

  • Where to hire engineers in London?

    Lots of people approach me about finding “technical co-founders” “a few great engineers” for their companies. It’s not easy to hire at the moment, much less so in London where the banks and successful Seedcamp startups eat away all the talent (or so).

    Where to advertise for and find engineers?

    I usually say “good luck” with regards to the cofounder.

    When hiring a team (at market range salaries, with a great package, of course), I can recommend a couple of ressources (skewed towards London):

      1. workinstartups.com is ran by Diana, and a great ressource to advertise your (mostly UK-based) jobs.
      2. Silicon Milkroundabout not only has a great name, it is also a series of excellent recruiting events for tech startups. The nice folks at Songkick put it up, and the next one is coming in May. Be there.
      3. Stackoverflow has an excellent careers page. It is probably the most relevant ressource for developers. Profiles are not cheap, but according to founder friends, highly valuable.
      4. Forrst looks cute, is ran by Kyle (a great guy I only know through email), and a great place to find designers.
      5. Dribble is another great place to find designers – browse around to see what’s going on, quite the time waster if you like good design.

    If you are looking for hardcore developers, try scouring github (or let your engineers do it) for folks that work on cool, relevant stuff, and are based around you. They might be interested or able to recommend someone from their circles.

    In general, you need to be extremely resourceful when looking for talent, finding your ways to folks that work on the relevant platforms and technologies. Hiring is hard.

    If you have suggestions for more places to look – leave them in the comments, both for London and other places. If you share your own hiring hacks, you get extra Karma points.

    Oh, and if you are looking for a job in a startup – let me know. I might be able to help out.

    ADDITION

    Florian added a great comment that everyone should read, especially regarding investor /employee communication:

    I have been involved in hiring engineers for the last 2-3 years. The following builds on this experience.
    Okay, hiring hack share alert: I see numerous startups advertising engineering positions who pitch their company to engineers in the same way as they would to investors or founder peers.
    This leads to the following: Strong focus on the company’s market position, growth perspective etc etc. Strong emphasis on the current technology stack as a required skill set. Hype lingo (“stealth ninja CTO magician needed”).

    Far more interesting for high calibre engineers is the following: Describe your company starting with its engineering challenges. Focus on high level challenges that allow developers to think.
    Try and understand what specific skills your hire needs and where an agnostic developer with a broad range of experience will be able to onboard himself quickly (eg you probably don’t need a coffeescript expert, as someone with considerable javascript experience will be able to work productively with coffeescript in a matter of days).

    Describe your development process. If you don’t have one, get one installed. There are exceptional engineers who cowboy code. As long as you never plan to grow a team larger than that one engineer: No problem. Oh, you do? Get a process. Describe it.

    Cut the lingo. All the engineers I know hate it. If you want to stand out, use terms that engineers use to describe themselves. “Maker” is an example. “IT whizz” is not.

    Oh, and we’re hiring: http://mindmatters.co.uk

  • The peculiarities of education startups

    My colleague Carlos forwarded an article today:

    Most entrepreneurs in education build the wrong type of business, because entrepreneurs think of education as a quality problem. The average person thinks of it as a cost problem.

    Building in education does not follow an Internet company’s growth curve. Do it because you want to fix problems in education for the next 20 years.

    There are opportunities in education in servicing the poor in the US and building a company in Asia — not in selling to the middle class in the US.

    The underlying culture will change and expose interesting opportunities in the long term, but probably not for another 5 years.

    via Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed « Avichal’s Blog.

    Read the whole article, because it’s fascinating. I have thought about education for a long time (mostly because I received a good one, by chance and good choice), and find the situation quite troubling in many ways. However, I agree with Avichal – it’s a mess, and it‘s not easy to solve. Here’s a brain dump of my thoughts about the topic – I would love to speak to some people in the market to understand it better.

    The current status

    Education is either paid for by the state (=no opportunities to make much revenue, other than by disruption, and disruption and govt are not in the same bed), and/or it’s tightly controlled by large corporates that bank on the status quo (private colleges).

    Thus, it’s mostly a vitamins vs painkiller debate when talking about education things like learning apps, classroom organisation, etc. Due to the nature of top-down decisions in the classroom, the large corporates and their salesforce and lobbying are better positioned for quite a while.

    In 2nd and 3rd world countries, it might be a different thing, but this is also where the devices aren’t yet available. thus, it’s much cheaper and easier to facilitate change with people instead of technology there. The educational system in the poorer countries is still stuck in the 60s/70s when it comes to teaching methods. Talk to anyone who does voluntary or even vocational teaching in poor countries, and it’s all full frontal teaching with students writing and listening. They have neither money, education, nor infrastructure to allow for new methods of teaching.

    Seeing the education in the EU, it is very slowly breaking up to be more interactive and integrative, catering to individuals. This comes from both a very well funded education system (in reality, lots of money and leave no child behind type teaching) and our acceptance of new technology (and our own daily use). This will both take very long to come to the poorer markets, and necessitate solutions that are yet to be developed.

    What makes me hopeful

    is that most teachers (and builders, and professors, and politicians, and loads of other professions) are led and populated by baby boomer aged folks. Think about it – almost all of these professions are people in similar ages, and the following generation wasn’t one of the strongest in terms of development. The baby boomers got kids early, worked hard, studied a lot – their kids smoked pot, went to woodstock, studied until their 30s, and are now in safe positions where they want everything but change (nice over-generalization, right?).

    This leads to a new generation of very powerfully motivated people in our age group, wanting change. Look at us as an example – we’re leading the way in our field, simply overtaking a lot of people who are older than us, and stuck in old ways of thinking and working. In the educational sector, this is even stronger so, as teaching hasn‘t changed in a long time. There weren’t many teaching positions open in the 80s and 90s, but now a whole generation (the boomers) need to be replaced in about the next 10 years. I talked about this to one of my older teachers last week – almost all of the teaching body at my high school has actually changed in the last 8 years.

    Long story short

    that’s when new methods of teaching, bottom-up adoption of tools, and a much more cost effective, democratized version of education is possible. We have the tools, infrastructure, and knowledge to benefit from the possibilities. We also still have the large budgets, which is why the new education market can take off economically.

    The poorer countries don’t have any of the prerequisites, which is why they need radically different solutions, NOW. Without knowing these markets, it’s terribly difficult to build the necessary tools. Avichal makes a great point in his blog post, especially about the Asian markets – but you need to know these to play a part.

    Because of the long term nature of the problem and its solutions, I am similarly sceptical about the market and especially investment opportunities without a really long term horizon.

    TL;DR: There are a lot of structural problems to overcome or play along – it’s difficult, but exciting.

  • What if my local startup scene is lame?

    I got several emails after Seedcamp Ljubljana from entrepreneurs who were looking for advice and mentoring. Apart from direct advice, the most common question was “where can I get mentorship and advice in my home town?”

    I copy pasted this 3 times, and I think it’s a great, if not the only real way to get things kicking off if your local startup scene is lame:

    • I’d check local meetups, open coffee, hackernews meetings, conferences, meet other entrepreneurs and founders, hackers, and bloggers.
    • If that doesn’t exist – build it yourself, get some entrepreneurs together, start a movement, share insights, tips, learnings, travel to places (some slovenians did a cool trip to the silicon valley with 20 people and crashed startup parties), everything else you can think of.
    • Check out university programs, talk to professors, students, guest lecturers, researchers, they often have insights of what is going on. Throw a local event to get cool founders from other places to your town
    • The upside: If you can make yourself the leader of that movement, you will open lots of doors, meet investors, and other, travelling entrepreneurs that come to your area. You are now the boss of your new, cool, local startup scene.
    I am sure you have more ideas than I have. All in all, this should only take about 5-10 years.

    Update from the comments: I still think that travelling to technology hubs, conferences, and meetups in other places is crucial to build your personal and professional network. If you are in Europe, you should go and spend a week in London, Berlin or Paris every now and then to be part of what’s going on there. The energy and connections are hard to beat.

  • Me, talking.

    Boring, i know.

    Thanks a lot to Manuel Gruber for the interview – was a lot of fun. I am looking forward to the final movie.

  • Was mache ich überhaupt bei Seedcamp

    Mit Joel abhängen und Videos drehen:

    Philipp Möhring (Seedcamp) im Interview: “Deutschland hat einen zu kleinen und großen Markt”

  • Ein Post, den ich eh schreiben wollte.

    Je suis dans le news.

    Momentan sehe ich die folgenden Makro-Trends, ohne auf einzelnes einzugehen: Online-Offline ist ein Thema, das immer besser umgesetzt wird, wobei sich Startups auf die Nischen konzentrieren müssen, die nicht von den Big Boys wie Google und Groupon angegangen werden. Big Data in allen Bereichen wird immer wichtiger, und erlaubt noch viel Innovation. Die Software”-isierung” von klassischen Technologien wird fortschreiten, und alles geht in die Cloud.

    Mein Interview auf Seedfinance.de: Philipp Möhring von Seedcamp: “Entscheidend ist die ökonomische Logik und internationale Skalierbarkeit!”.

  • VC vs startup career – Quora blogging

    As many others, I’m becoming addicted to Quora – loads of deep and good information and insights on interesting topics.

    Here’s my (admittedly biased) answer to the question “What’s the case for working as an associate at an early stage venture capital firm rather than a startup?”

    Some of the skills you develop at an early stage investor are very similar to what you do in a startup – and some are very different.

    Why would you work for a venture investor in the first place?

    • You get tons of exposure to what is happening in the market. There is no better way of developing an overview of trends and movements than at an early stage VC.
    • You are actually working in a startup yourself. Early stage firms are small teams, have limited amounts of capital, need to be very flexible, and require massive amounts of work – that’s very similar to a startup. You are project managing, recruiting, marketing, developing website and similar things – for your own firm and for all of your portfolio.
    • There is no better way to build a network – no matter if you want to startup yourself or want to continue being an investor.
    • You are not dialling for dollars (cold calling potential investments), because early stage firms work different than later stage – you have to meet people. Also, to understand businesses in the early stages is totally different than looking at numbers and growth rates in established businesses.
    • An associate role is much less analytical and theoretical than in a large fund, and usually much less business/finance focused. This is the case for most of the folks in early stage though: you need to have a very good grasp of operations to run successful investments (more hands on, advice, etc in early stage than later).

    (a lot of these answers coincide with the original answer, also check back there)

    Why would you not start a startup instead?

    You need some different skills than as a founder. It’s a great job (the best, in my eyes), but definitely not an easy one.

    • You need to handle 10-30 different companies, understand different markets, have totally diverse contacts, and a good overview of all of this.
    • Skills include much more of broad knowledge, less specific and deep domain expertise. For some, this comes more naturally.
    • You might be on the look out to start something longer term, with a lot of insights.
    • You have ADD, in which case the dynamic nature of the job fits your personality really well.

    Negatives:

    You have to say “no” a lot. It could make you hesitant of starting your own (but then, why are you in the startup world).

    Depending on the firm, you can get used to a lot of money coming your way, resulting in the same challenges you have as a consultant or banker: It is really hard to start a company after getting used to a paycheck.

    I am an associate for Seedcamp in London, a micro seed fund in London. Above reflects my own experience, so feel free to deduce from that.