Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Welcome to This Week in Awesome People Talent! These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable on an interim basis.
Please meet Raphael, the founder of A.Team, your go-to for on-demand tech teams 🚀
I originally met Raphael via Addie Lerner, one of my favorite Series A investors. Raphael has since become one of my favorite collaborators. I don’t have enough good things to say about him 🙏.
Raphael built his first company when he was 16. He relocated from France to Israel to be at the center of innovation. He’s been building companies ever since.
Raphael’s current startup, A.Team, helps you spin up on-demand tech teams. They augment your core team with flexible talent, including top-tier developers, product managers, designers, marketers, data scientists, and operators.
A.Team is used by the portfolio companies of top VCs like NfX, a16z, Village Capital, Softbank, and Insight Venture Partners. We’re also huge fans at Awesome People Ventures! Most companies that hire A.Teams, love them, and keep their A.Teams forever. Hello strong NPS!!
Want to augment your current team with an A.Team? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you with Raphael to discuss!
Raphael was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here ✨
Consider remote teams for your most important, time-constrained missions
Former Waze CEO Noam Bardin’s recently published, The 10x engineers you are trying to hire are all gone. Deal with it!.” He explains why it makes sense to hire remote on-demand teams for top talent.
Here’s a case study. Apprentice.io brings drugs to market faster than traditional pharma companies. Earlier this year, Apprentice was slammed with demand to support the manufacturing and distribution of COVID vaccines.They needed to scale fast. Racing against a global pandemic, they had to rebuild the platform, add new features, and add integrations. They engaged 30+ A.Teamers across five teams and essentially doubled their existing team. They did all of this in under a month.
It was an urgent and complex mission. It would have taken Apprentice 6-10 months to hire everyone directly. Apprentice couldn’t afford to block on recruiting cycles. Since we have 5,000+ highly-skilled builders, we could easily onboard several full-stack teams in < a week.
One of the challenges with full-time employees is that your startup’s needs change faster than your org chart. We think in terms of missions, not org charts. Our TeamGraph matches builders’ skill sets to projects.
Additionally, since A.Teams have worked together in the past, they ship products faster than brand new full-time teams.
Motivate top builders by showing why missions matter
Many of the world’s top builders are leaving their full-time jobs to work on things they’re passionate about. People want to work on things that matter and impact their friends and family.
Our team formation platform uses experience, performance, and teamwork scoring to build your ideal team. We build teams to align with your mission. For example, we helped Clearco build a new platform called ClearAngel. It’s like a virtual YC, but for founders who don’t have access to capital, advice, and networks. The mission of expanding access to capital attracted top builders.
A.Teams loved working with Clearco. Here are some things that made the project attractive to world-class builders. Consider incorporating these tactics into your org:
Use voice messages rather than daily/weekly calls to improve efficiency
Measure and compensate output rather than time
Make your mission clear and repeat it often
Use digital social graces to integrate internal teams + remote builders
The talent market is shifting fast. Everyone from large enterprises to seed-stage startups is embracing hybrid remote teams to ship high-quality products.
It’s important to quickly build trust with new talent. Here are some methods we’ve seen work:
Build rapport by hosting virtual meetups (game days, holiday parties, etc) with both FT employees and PT remote teams.
Encourage open and transparent communication. Treat everyone as one team. Add all of your team members, FT and PT, to the same communication channels and project management tools (i.e. Slack, Notion, etc.).
Keep everyone in the loop. Host all-hands meetings (at least once a month) with both FT and PT team members.
Want to augment your FT team and ship faster? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you to Raphael!
As always, let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to any of the folks in this email (including the PS section 🎉).
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures (join the syndicate here)
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Awesome People Continued 🥳
Most recent features
Lucy started Inward, a group that works with venture-backed teams to tackle employee leadership, role transitions, performance, and well-being. You can hire Lucy and Inward to provide virtual one-on-one coaching to help your team reach their potential inside and outside of work.
Ashish spent 6+ years at Google and WhatsApp as a software engineer before jumping into crypto. He works with CTOs and advises companies like Joveo (Series B SaaS co) and Azteco (a platform to buy Bitcoin). You can hire Ashish as a technical advisor, blockchain expert, or senior software engineer.
John-Henry is your SEO & digital marketing expert. Hire him to map out your entire buyer journey to content and keywords, develop your SEO & content strategy, and build collaborative processes for content ops.
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!
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