Most advice on landing a startup job treats “startup” as one kind of employer. It isn’t. A four-person company that closed a seed round last month and a 400-person company preparing a Series D have almost nothing in common as hiring organisations. One has no recruiter, no careers page and a founder who reads every email. The other has an applicant tracking system, a hiring committee and a queue.
So the first decision is not which job board to open. It is which kind of startup you want, because that decides who reads your application, what they want to see and whether a posted role exists at all. The rest of this guide follows that order: stage, then where the roles come from, then what to show, then how to reach the person who decides.
How is getting hired at a startup different from a big company?
At a small startup, a founder usually makes the hiring decision personally, often before any job post exists, and mostly from people they already know or meet. At a big company, a recruiting team runs a fixed process around posted roles.
The founder-led part is not a guess. In Y Combinator’s guide for founders, “How to Hire Your First Engineer”, Harj Taggar ranks the sources a young company should use and puts personal networks first: “This is the most important source by far.” He describes the work involved as well: “Expect to be spending at least a third of your time on this alone.”
Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook says the same from the CEO’s side: once a company is in recruiting mode, founders “should spend about 25% of your time on it.”
Two things follow for you:
- The decision-maker is reachable. At ten people there is no gatekeeper between your email and the founder’s inbox.
- The role may not be written down yet. A founder working through their network fills seats before writing a post, so a search limited to job boards sees only part of the market.
How do startups hire at each stage?
The closer a startup is to its first funding round, the more the founder does the hiring personally and the less likely the role is posted. Later rounds bring recruiters, careers pages and an interview loop that looks more like a big company’s.
Crunchbase News, which tracks funding rounds, groups them as pre-seed and seed, then Series A and B for earlier-stage companies, then Series C onward for later-stage ones. The table below maps those stages to what usually changes for a candidate. The hiring patterns are general tendencies, not rules; check each company.
| Stage | Who usually decides | Is the role posted? | What to send |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed and seed | A founder, often personally | Often not, or only on the founder’s own channels | A brief founder email that links one relevant piece of work |
| Series A | A founder plus the first team leads | Usually, on a careers page or a startup board | The application, plus a note to the founder or the lead for that team |
| Series B | Team leads, with a recruiter running the process | Yes, through an applicant tracking system | A tailored application; a referral or a note to the hiring manager helps |
| Series C and later | A hiring manager and an interview panel | Yes, with structured interviews | A standard, tailored application; outreach matters less |
If you want the full definitions and where early-stage roles get listed in New York, London and remotely, see early-stage startup jobs and the stages explained.
Where do startup jobs come from before they reach a job board?
Mostly from a founder’s own network, from their public posts and from the news that tells you the company can now pay someone. Job boards come later, once the founder has time to write a post.
Here is where to look, roughly in the order a role surfaces:
- Funding and launch news. A new round is the clearest sign that hiring is about to start. How to find startups before they post roles covers reading those signals in detail.
- Founders’ own channels. Early hiring often starts as a line on a founder’s social profile or the company blog before any formal listing.
- The monthly Hacker News hiring thread. “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” asks posters to be part of the hiring company themselves rather than recruiters or job boards, so the person posting is often the one deciding.
- YC’s job pages. YC Work at a Startup takes one profile for applying across YC companies, and founders there can approach you first; you can also browse without announcing it. The YC Startup Directory lists the companies themselves, so you can look up a startup you heard about.
- Wellfound. Wellfound carries listings from startups of every size and labels each company’s stage, which helps you filter for the table above.
- Careers pages. Once a company is past seed, its own careers page is usually the most current list of open roles.
The earlier in that list a role appears, the fewer candidates have seen it.
How hard is it to get a job at a startup?
Through the application form, about as hard as anywhere else, because small startups get flooded too. Through a direct line to a founder, noticeably easier, since the competition at that point is the founder’s own network.
Ashby, an applicant tracking system, analysed “over 13 million applications of predominantly US-based tech companies with between 1 and 1,500 employees”. It reported that “we broke the data down by company size but, surprisingly, did not find significant differences”. A 30-person startup with a posted role can receive the same pile that a larger company does.
Ashby’s referral report explains why the direct route works better: “Referred and internal candidates are often seen as lower risk as they come ‘validated’ from employees.” A cold note to a founder is not a referral, and nobody should pretend it carries the same weight. What it shares with a referral is that it arrives outside the queue, from a named person, with a reason attached.
So the hard part is mostly not the bar. It is getting a founder to look at you at all.
What proof of work do startups want to see?
Something finished that resembles the job they need done next. A startup reads a small, relevant artifact faster and with more trust than a list of responsibilities.
The Startup Playbook puts it directly: value aptitude over experience “for almost all roles”, and “Look for raw intelligence and a track record of getting things done.” That is the standard to write for. Some examples by role:
- Engineering: a deployed project with a public repo, a pull request merged into a tool the startup uses, or a small fix or feature built against their public API.
- Design: a redesign of one real flow in their product, with the reasoning, not a portfolio of unrelated work.
- Sales or growth: a list of 20 accounts that fit their product, with why each fits and how you would open the conversation.
- Operations or founder’s office: a one-page teardown of a process their customers or job posts suggest is painful, with a proposed fix.
Keep it small enough to finish in a weekend. One specific piece of work about their product beats three generic ones.
How do you get a job at a startup with no experience?
Aim where your partial fit is enough, and let your work stand in for the missing experience line. Seed and Series A teams care more about whether you can do the next thing than about job titles.
Three adjustments help most:
- Pick roles where you already do part of the job. A self-taught developer with two shipped apps is a plausible junior engineer at a seed startup; a career changer from retail operations is a plausible operations hire at a commerce startup.
- Lead with the artifact. Put the link in the first two lines of your note or application, ahead of education and history.
- Offer a short, paid trial project. Some small teams would rather see a week of real work than run a long interview loop, and the offer lowers the founder’s risk.
Avoid the trap of applying only to “entry level” listings at large startups. Those listings tend to screen on credentials you don’t have yet, and the posted queue gives your work no chance to speak first.
How do you get a startup job out of college?
Start a semester early and treat the job search like a small project of its own. Startups rarely recruit on a campus calendar, so the student who writes to a seed-stage founder in March often beats the one waiting for a career fair.
A workable sequence for a final-year student:
- Choose one domain you already know from coursework, a club or an internship, such as developer tools, health or fintech.
- Build or contribute to one thing in that domain before graduation.
- List 20 young companies in the domain from YC’s directory, Wellfound and recent funding news.
- Write to the founders of the ten you would most like to join, each note naming something specific about their product.
- Apply on posted roles too, especially YC’s job pages, which let founders reach your profile.
Fresher jobs at startups covers this in more depth for graduates in India, including which proof of work to lead with.
How do you reach the founder directly?
Find the founder’s email, write a note of under 100 words that connects one result of yours to their current problem, send it from your own address, and nudge twice more in that thread if nobody answers. That is the whole method; the effort is in doing it well for each company.
Done by hand, each startup takes a while: confirming who the founder is, finding and checking the address, reading the product and news, then drafting a note that couldn’t be sent to anyone else. How to find a startup founder’s email covers the address part, and the founder cold-email guide has templates.
Letting Backdoor find the founder and draft the note
If the hours are what stop you, Backdoor runs that loop with you holding the veto. Overnight news is its raw material: YC batches, Product Hunt launches, funding stories on TechCrunch and Crunchbase, Wellfound, GitHub and careers pages, read each morning for young, funded companies anywhere that match your background. For each match, it looks up the founder’s address and writes a draft about your fit.
What makes it fit this page’s question is the order of control. “Nothing goes out until you say send,” and approved notes leave from your Gmail, so the founder’s reply lands in your inbox. It follows up up to three times in that thread and stops when someone answers.
The limits are worth knowing before you start. Backdoor writes to founders, not recruiters, and it does not fill in application forms. It aims at pre-seed to Series C companies and is plain that people mass-applying to large employers should look elsewhere. Discovery and resume help are free; the sending is what you pay for.
A note from a final-year student to a seed-stage founder
Subject: Fixed the timezone bug in your public API client
Hi Maya,
Saw Shiftly’s seed round last week. I’ve been using your API for a class project that schedules lab shifts for 200 students, and I hit the daylight-saving bug in the Python client. I opened a pull request with a fix and tests (link).
I graduate in May and I’d like to work on scheduling problems like this full time. Could we talk for 15 minutes about whether a junior engineer would help right now?
Priya
Five days later, same thread: “Quick follow-up: I also wrote up the two other edge cases I found while testing, in case they’re useful (link). Happy to keep contributing either way.”
Every name and detail above is illustrative. To adapt it, keep the structure: their news in the first line, a piece of work about their product in the second, one small ask. If you have no pull request to point to, a short demo or written teardown can play the same role.
Your first ten startups over the next two weeks
Week one is research and one piece of work. Pick a stage from the table, list 20 startups at that stage in your field, and narrow them to ten you would genuinely join. Build or write one artifact for the company at the top of that list; it will usually be reusable, with edits, for two or three others.
Week two is sending. Write ten founder notes, apply to any posted roles at the same companies, and plan follow-ups for days three and seven. Count replies at the end. If founders answer and applications don’t, you have found your channel; if neither answers, revisit the artifact before you revisit the volume. When the silence is from applications you have already sent, the 200-applications checklist walks through what to audit, and follow-up tools cover the second and third email.
How we chose
We compare tools on what their own public pages say, checked on the dates shown, and label every claim. How we compare tools.
FAQ
How to get a job at a startup
Choose the stage you want, since a ten-person company and a 300-person one hire in different ways. Build one piece of work that shows you can do the job that company needs next, and send it to the person deciding, which at a small startup is usually a founder. Keep using YC's Work at a Startup and Wellfound for roles that are already posted.
How to get a job at a startup with no experience
Replace the experience line with evidence: something you built, shipped, sold or fixed that resembles the work the startup needs. Sam Altman's Startup Playbook tells founders to look for 'a track record of getting things done', which a small finished project can show. Aim at seed and Series A teams with a role you can already do in part, and write to the founder with the work attached.
How to get a job at a startup out of college
Start before graduation, because small startups rarely hire on a campus timetable. Ship one project in the startup's domain, apply on the boards that list entry roles, and write to founders at seed-stage companies whose product you have actually used. Offering a short paid trial project can also lower the risk for a founder weighing a new graduate.
How hard is it to get a job at a startup
Through the application form, about as hard as anywhere: Ashby looked at 13 million applications at tech companies of 1 to 1,500 employees and found applications per job did not differ significantly by company size. It gets easier when a founder hears about you directly, because early hires mostly come through people the founder knows or meets. The difficulty is mostly in getting noticed, not in the bar itself.
I don't know anyone at any startup, how do i get hired at one
Build the network on purpose, one founder at a time. Pick ten startups that raised or launched recently in your field, find each founder's email, and send a short note tying one result of yours to their product, with up to three follow-ups in the same thread. Backdoor can run that loop for you: it finds the startups and the founder addresses, drafts each note, and sends only what you approve.
Sources checked
Show 10 sources
- How to Hire Your First Engineer (Harj Taggar, Y Combinator), checked
- Startup Playbook, by Sam Altman, checked
- 2023 Trends Report | Applications Per Job | Ashby, checked
- Are referred candidates more likely to get hired? | Ashby, checked
- How The Crunchbase News Team Uses Data In Its Reporting, checked
- Find the best startup jobs and remote jobs curated by Y Combinator. | Y Combinator, checked
- The YC Startup Directory | Y Combinator, checked
- Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026) | Hacker News, checked
- Find Startup Jobs Near You and Remote Jobs | Wellfound, checked
- Backdoor: AI job agent that emails startup founders for you, checked