Hiring in Public: The (WIP) Playbook for building VC teams - pt 1

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour. 

When I first read this sentence from James Clear of Atomic Habits, it resonated with me because it was the best metaphor I could find for what we’re trying to do at Blume Ventures - Backing the next wave of revolutionary founders, from India, for the world WHILE building a world-class Venture Capital team. 

How do you marry the ultimate vision with the everyday work?

You add one brick every hour. You get 1% better at what you’re doing, and keep doing it. 

One of the challenges I took on (or rather, inherited) when I joined was to help Blume find and retain great people to work in this long-term game of building sustainable businesses while also helping them buid great careers out of this. Mind you, this is happening at a time when working in Venture Capital has suddenly become the it thing. No longer is it a hush-hush world where you only get in through referrals or if you know someone. VC firms are getting bigger and bolder in their aspirations, their growth stories and their offers of exponential growth for people who want to join them. VC firms are also waking up to the importance of bringing in lateral talent, talent that has already gotten their hands dirty, that has credibility having built in the trenches or having failed and reinvented themselves. While this opened up larger talent pools for us, it also brought on another challenge. 

Earlier, the offer on the table for someone wanting to get into this industry probably was “should I join X VC firm or Y VC firm?” Today, the choice lies between “do I join an early-stage VC, do I join the founding team at this startup or do I start up on my own?”

These questions cannot be answered by a simple apples-to-apples comparison. It’s impossible to compare and contrast what you get out of all of these roles and experiences. More so, if all three are viewed simply from the lens of “they’re all just a job”. They’re not. 

That’s why we’ve been working hard at deconstructing and rebuilding our process for finding people to join the team with two main goals: 

1. People who want to work in VC should really understand what it means upfront. They should know exactly (or as much as possible) what they’re getting into, and what it would mean - from a work and a wealth perspective. Why else would someone commit to us? This also saves time for us and ensures that it's a meaningful process.
2. We should be able to get a very strong sense of what their aspirations and ambitions are, and if they align with the way we want to build Blume. We should be able to have majority buy-in from the core team, and not take singular decisions. VC teams tend to be fairly lean, so every new person added brings their own dimensions of culture, work style and impact on the rest. It's almost like the collective decision of voting in a new member of a tribe. Will we all be able to back and support this person?

In essence, we should be willing and ready to get married. 

We’ve had a fair amount of feedback over the last year - mostly positive - to a lot of innovative approaches we’ve taken to address steps 1 and 2, and we wanted to share in public how we’re approaching the incredibly important work of building our team. 

Rarely does step number 1 above get covered in hiring processes. Companies often expect candidates to figure this out on their own. But Venture Capital doesn’t make it easy. 

As someone brought on to help facilitate this process at Blume, it took me 6 months myself to understand what working in Venture Capital is actually like - and this is as an observer, who isn’t making direct investments or working with founders. 

Why is step 1 (really explaining to people what it's like to work in VC) important?

At Blume, we have 3 types of roles within the team, that sit within 3 functions. 

1. Investment team roles - responsible for sourcing teams/founders working on great ideas that are tied to thesis areas where we have conviction, presenting + closing the deal and working with these companies to take them to the next level and make them successful. 
2. Platform roles - non-capital value adding roles that specialize in a particular area and bring knowledge + connections + access to opportunities to help drive a particular aspect of startup success. These currently include fundraising for startups to help them get to their next round + bringing on relevant co-investors, go-to-market strategy and commercial business opportunities, and peer learning + community building to foster help our companies learn from each other, work better together and get connected to experts and mentors 
3. Corporate roles - responsible for governance, compliance, operation and the broad work of institution building. These involve teams working on people & culture, finance & fund operations and investor relations.

Many of these roles were played in some way by our partners as recently as 5 years ago - and we’re only 11 years old today. There was no manual that they followed to see what needs to be done. When you operate from the place of doing everything you can to make a founder successful, you do whatever it takes. And whatever literally means whatever - whether that’s connecting them with an SEO expert, helping figure out ESOPs, hiring for their CFO, making intros to PE and IB, or helping find an M&A opportunity. 

We realised early on that if we wanted to do all of this, we had to do it well. And that meant putting in more time, something that only one or two individuals don’t have the luxury of when doing everything else. 

While Corporate team roles may seem and sound familiar to similar roles in other industries, and could reasonably be performed thus with limited additional learning also, roles in the Investment and Platform team require two additional factors to consider:

• understanding delayed impact and delayed gratification
• being comfortable with indirect attribution and indirect impact

When you're one of many VCs working with a startup, you do the best you can to help them. However, it is not always directly possible to attribute outcomes to inputs. How can you be certain that what you did for XYZ startup resulted in them raising a round, hiring an individual or launching a product? You can't. Does it matter? According to us, it shouldn't. You continue doing what you believe is the best thing for that company or that founder, with the implicit belief that it will make an impact and have a positive outcome in the long run.

You also realise early on that impact and change doesn't happen immediately. It takes at least 3 years for an investment we've made to start showing signs of whether the company will take off or remain flat, or even not succeed. After 3 years, there's another set of unique challenges that come up as the company now has a different set of challenges to face. What you did as an Investor or as a Platform team resource 3 years ago needs to be pushed further - which means you need to invest in your own learning and growth to match pace with the startup's challenges. It's only after an average of 6-7 years where you'd get some line of sight into the horizon and how a company would possibly exit or move on from your early stage portfolio. And by then a new crop of companies has come into your fold. So you compartmentalize parts of yourself to start the process all over again :) But this is something that has to be intrinsically part of what you want to do every single day. It's not something that you'll be driven to do by targets, KRAs, goals or incentives. When a company wins, you win and Blume wins. That's our bottom line, and THAT'S what we're looking for when we speak to potential candidates to join our team.

The tough part? How to explain this to someone. How can we hire for potential to do something that has never been done before? How can we evaluate someone's understanding and expectation of impact, growth and success in relative terms to how our work would progress? How can we make sure people know exactly what they're interviewing for, and have the time to reflect on whether it's right for them? It is hard to capture all of the above into a JD. Most of the time, decisions can also be taken based on the person first and role second - if a VC firm finds a good person who’s a smart generalist and can figure things out along the way, they bring them on and try on different roles and activities until 1-2 stick. 

This is actually a good strategy, and not one to be dissed. As you’re building in the early years, you do need all hands on deck. People who can move fast, learn and figure things out. That’s exactly what the early years of Blume looked like. We didn’t have people who were experts in Fintech, SaaS, HR Tech. We had people who were excited by the idea of helping build companies, support and celebrate entrepreneurs and wanting to contribute to the India Growth Story. And that was perfect for us. Everyone learnt on the job and became the experts. 

Today, that’s not going to be enough. And that’s why we realised that our process of both figuring out what roles need to be filled to help us get to 2030 and beyond, as well as the kind of people we brought into the team needed to be planned more strategically. 

Every person we brought to Blume received the keys to our house. That’s not a small responsibility or privilege. We wanted to mirror our hiring process to elicit the same feeling, because only then could we be assured of bringing on owners, and not just employees. Every person who joins Blume agrees with and aligns with our long-term vision, but does enjoy the freedom of figuring out what they want to do with their room in the house. 

The last reason we had for focusing on a strong process for bringing on talent was increasing access and opportunities for more people to consider venture capital as a career and a calling. Our commitment to fairness as one of our guiding principles makes this an important aspect as we look at whom to add to the team. We wanted to be doubly certain of not getting swayed by pedigree, titles, and the shiny wrapping so to speak, and expand both our reach as well as consideration of different profiles and types of people who may or may not have had access to our team otherwise. 

How did we reimagine the process? The first step was to go overboard by telling potential candidates what we were looking for. 

We made incredibly comprehensive JDs.

• The first step in hiring once you cross 5 years of operations, or have crossed 15 people, is to be quite clear about why you’re bringing someone on now, and what they will do. There isn’t as much grey area or stuff up for grabs that someone new can take up to expand their role, scope and area of learning after a certain portion of the team is quite well settled. Being crystal clear yourself first helps communicate the right aspects of the role, work and expectations when you start speaking with candidates. 
• The JD should really answer almost every question someone may have about this role. We believe in giving as much information upfront to allow candidates to self-select into the process and role together with us. We don’t want to sell a role to anyone. We try to talk about how the role evolved, what it will most certainly start off doing, and what it could look like. 
• We focused on “key requirements” of the role not in terms of qualifications/degrees or past experiences, but rather on what they would be expected to do and deliver. We believe in output and outcomes versus inputs being an indicator of success. An MBA in Marketing, for example, doesn’t guarantee that someone would be a great marketing lead. But 8-10 years creating content, building marketing strategy, conceptualizing great offline events and being able to build high-performing teams in startup environments gives a better taste of what’s possible. Experience comes from everywhere, everyday. We didn’t totally ditch the degree but we looked for other indicators of what people have done to give us  flavour of what they could do. 
• We explain who the key stakeholders of the role will be. In Venture Capital - and at least at Blume - there are no bosses, so to speak. While everyone does have 1-2 people who mentor them and provide guidance, people are accountable to Blume, to the firm overall, and the expectation is that you are serving multiple stakeholders to help them achieve their goals. This is a critical aspect of working in VC that is a difficult transition for many people to make, and the more clearly you lay this out, the better someone can judge for themselves if they’re comfortable working in such an environment - and can always choose to opt out of such an org structure as well!
• Linked to the previous point, we also try hard to articulate what success in the role would look like. One of the most complex pieces of my work has been articulating short term goals in a business that favours long term returns. As we’re all tuned to long term outcomes for our companies, how do we keep track of what’s happening in the short term, on a quarterly or annual basis? How do we measure success of our initiatives and programs? In a business and industry built on relationships, how do we calculate the return on relationships, brand building, culture, relationships and when these will yield results? We can’t always do this well, but we can talk about what could change within 1 year, within 2 years and ultimately with a 5 year horizon, what our wishlist looks like. Whether its realistic or not, it at least gives a great starting point for a conversation during an interview with the candidate to discuss these and see if both sides are aligned on making this happen. 
• Why this role, and why now? Having been on the other side of interviews for almost 5 years now, this question normally comes to the interviewing panel / company at the end of the interview process, usually when the candidate is asked if they have anything additional to ask of us. I think this is a great disservice to candidates who deserve to have this information right at the start as they are considering the role. If a new role has come up, what more does it need? What wasn’t working earlier? This isn’t a big change, but introducing this earlier on in the process helps the candidate be better prepared to engage meaningfully. Imagine hearing at the end of a great process where you’re almost sure that you’d take the job, that the role is open now because every past candidate was burnt out or not satisfied with the job!  

Getting 1% better with Job Descriptions was our first step, our first brick in building a great candidate experience with Blume, to ultimately build a great place to work and a world-class institution. The next part of this series on Hiring in Public will cover how we run interviews, consider live assignments and case studies, and why each mid to senior role candidate speaks with at least 9 people as part of their interview process! (We have a great reason for this, trust me!)

A sample of a recent JD that we prepared is shared in the comments below.