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The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

172: Finding A-Grade Talent on a Bootstrapped Budget with Cyan Ta'eed of Envato

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Nathan Chan

Marketing, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 662 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For any startup to be successful, it's going to need an amazing team. It's why Fortune 500 companies are willing to pay their executives so much, and invest millions of dollars into finding and hiring the right people. For the founders of startups, though, especially those that are bootstrapping, there's barely enough money to pay themselves, let alone hire anyone anyone else. The challenge of finding the right person to bring onto your team becomes that much harder. It's a position most founders find themselves in when they need to start bringing on new staff, and Cyan Ta'eed was no exception. In the beginning of Envato, one of the world's leading digital marketplaces with over 1.5 million active customers, it was just Ta'eed and her two other co-founders. It was a 100% bootstrapped operation, and still is today, and for a while, the three-person team was enough. But they soon quickly realized that if they were to grow any further, they needed to grow their team. "We couldn't offer above market, because so many startups who had taken funding to get these amazing, sort of, guns. These people who can command these incredibly high salaries," Ta'eed says. "So instead we would look for people with great potential, people who were entrepreneurial themselves, people who we knew could take the ball and run with it." Ta'eed hit the pavement and began the seemingly impossible task of finding that unicorn who's driven, entrepreneurial, and a problem-solver. In the end, though, she found a system that made finding and hiring exceptional talent, exceptionally easy. In this interview you'll learn: Where to look for when hunting for A-grade talent How to know whether your new employee is really going to help you grow What a highly effective founding team should look like How to juggle building multiple products without losing focus How Ta'eed disrupts an entire industry & much more!

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is episode number 172 with Sian Taid of the Founder Podcast.

0:07.3

What you need is thirst.

0:09.2

You need to be a thirsty human who is intent on learning.

0:13.2

It's a really fascinating exploration of human potential.

0:18.9

The Founder Podcast.

0:22.1

Even the greatest entrepreneurs had help.

0:25.0

If you want to learn from the most successful founders on the planet, you are in the right

0:29.5

place.

0:30.7

Branson, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Arianna Humphington, Steve Case, Gary V,

0:35.1

Sophia Amorosa, Barbara Corcoran, Damon, John.

0:37.7

Learn from the greatest minds in business today with interviews hosted by Nathan Chan.

0:42.3

This is not your average entrepreneur podcast.

0:45.9

The Founder Podcast.

0:53.0

Hey guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Before we start today's episode, I just want to let

0:59.1

you know that our goal at founder is to help entrepreneurs succeed however we can by giving

1:04.8

away high quality content in the form of interviews, blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos,

1:13.5

you name it. We put out so much content to help you. And another interesting project that we're working on right now is partnering with

1:18.1

world-class founders like Damon John, Alexa von Tobel, Greta Van Riel, and so many more to teach

1:24.4

crucial skills like negotiation, finance, e-commerce, and so much more.

1:31.1

So if you'd like to get access to these free trainings with founders like this, which is

1:36.6

100% free, just go to founder.com forward slash free.

1:41.4

Okay, so now let's talk about today's episode.

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