How Do You Recruit Passionate People Who Would Work For Free? – The Jun Loayza Interview
on Feb 26, 2009 - 8:16 PM PSTThe full program
This is an audio program. Listen and/or download here.
A few lessons from this program
Would you agree that a founder’s top job is finding passionate people?
Jun Loayza, founder of Viralogy, seems to keep drawing passionate people to him. In our interview, I asked him how hired developers, marketers and even at CTO for free. Here’s an edited excerpt from our interview.
What kind of people are you recruiting?
If they’re set on working for Microsoft or Google, they’re not going to hop on board. It’s the people who have a seed planted in their heads and say to themselves, “you know, I’m going to start my own company some day. “We’re getting fourth year students, before they graduat. We’re getting masters students before they graduate.
I say, “Why don’t you hop on to our startup right now. Get an understanding and feel for startups.
“I’m going to teach you about the marketing and strategy of it. Yu-kai Chou, my co-founder, is going to teach you about the funding side. And our CTO will give you more experience on the programming side. And it’ll be perfect.
“If you like it, you can join us long-term. You’ll have stock options. If not, you’ll have great experience you can take down the corporate route.”
How did you recruit students?
We needed marketing people. We were building FD Career, which was a site to help students be productive. So we needed to contact students.
I started our own marketing internship. I posted on the top 50 schools a marketing internship. It’s called the Campus Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) program. And our proposition was, if you work for us completely for free, I’ll teach you about entrepreneurship, branding and marketing, and it’s going to be fun.
And I just dove into it. I didn’t have a curriculum. It just developed as it went. We hired 20 campus CMO’s in the beginning. It went from March to December. At the end some dropped out and we had 15 people.
It was one of the most valuable experiences of my life too.
If you don’t pay them, what do you give them in return?
We’d meet on Skype every week. I branched out the team into four different teams of 5 each. I spent about an hour with each team.
I helped them start a blog. I helped them start a Twitter account. I talked to them about Digg, StumbleUpon. I talked to them about entrepreneurship, a business plan. Everything that I learned form my previous year as an entrepreneur.
And it was wonderful. I can’t stress enough what a great experience it was.
Give me your input. How do you recruit passionate people?
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February 26th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Hey Andrew, thank you so much for the opportunity to be on Mixergy. You got A LOT of high profile guests, and I’m glad that I was able to bring some valuable content and experience to your listeners.
For those of you who stuck through the 1-hour+ long interview, you are awesome! Shoot me an email sometime because I would love to chat
me [at] junloayza.com
February 26th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Hi Andrew,
Thank you so much for providing such great interviews. I know a lot about technology b/c I’ve been in it for years. However, I’m trying to learn more and more about what it takes to be a real web entrepreneur and you are helping me.
Listen, I have a very good friend that co-founded GumGum.com and I think you would have an excellent time interviewing him and a lot of people could benefit from it. I worked with him when I was back at Shopzilla.com. His name is Ari Mir and I think he would be a great candidate. Let me know if that interests you and I’ll put the two of you in touch.
Thanks again for these interviews. Keep up the the good work!
February 27th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Passion = Work for Free?!?…
Jun Loayza, founder of Viralogy, seems to keep drawing passionate people to him. In our interview, I asked him how hired developers, marketers and even at CTO for free. Here’s an edited excerpt from our interview….
February 27th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
The videos are better without the table!
February 27th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
@Dig for Leadership I thought the table was a good space filler
@Andrew: Wow! Very motivating! it’s great to hear from someone who haven’t yet gotten their first successful exit but in your view are on their way? I think these people can give a different perspective on a lot of things. I’m hearing more and more about having a co-founder and I am convinced. I think having a co-founder is vital to a company’s success. Now, I just need to find one.
I just thought of an idea for an interview. Do you know of any entrepreneurs who have made it by themselves and how they did it? This is not to promote one man founders but maybe a different perspective on things.
February 27th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
@Jun, thanks for doing this interview. It’s one of my favorites. So proud of what we recorded.
@Jonathan, thanks for the interview. I’m following up on your email now.
@Digg For Leadership, the desk isn’t ideal for video. I need to put it there because of the way my office is laid out.
@Jeff, it’s harder for me to find entrepreneurs who didn’t have founders. But I think these guys started alone:
http://mixergy.com/startup-angel
http://mixergy.com/derek-sivers
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:15 am
[...] the other social media networks. You can easily get people to do this for you for free. Listen to my interview with Andrew Warner to find out [...]
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:01 am
Thanks for sharing this interview with us Andrew. You are providing great learning tools for everyone listening. I wish you the best of luck Jun, I just submitted my running lifestyle blog to viralogy…
Salmiler
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
What's your site? I'm a runner too.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:05 am
Hey Andrew,
I have always enjoyed running and have ran competetively in high school and college ( UCSD class of '05 ). Today, I I enjoy it more than ever. Now my focus is longer distance runs like marathons and eventually ultramarathons. Currently getting ready for the LA marathon in May. To me its not about how fast your can run a race, its about living the lifestyle and benefiting from all the positive benefits that one gets from this running lifestyle. Recently I have been blogging about my running experiences on a running lifestyle blog I have made for myself. I am not very net savy but I have enjoyed the experience thus far. The website is salmiler.com and you can click on he link to my daily running blog. How often do you run. What are your running goals? Any runs coming up ? Marathons? I am super stoked that you run as well… living our lifestyle on the run, R U ?
Salmiler
salmiler.com
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I did a couple of marathons this year. I have an ultramarathon coming up
next month, but I haven't run in weeks, so I'm unprepared. Like you said,
for me it's not about the time or speed. I just like the lifestyle.
June 14th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
This is a fantastic interview. I didn't find it until a while after this interview. Jun's Awesome Bloggers series is wonderful as well because he interviews up and coming bloggers. I look forward to watching more of your interviews.
April 10th, 2010 at 3:10 am
that interesting iam looking people for and that would and could work for me in programing and interesting place i should start looking i would like to be the next microsoft company start from srcatch
April 10th, 2010 at 10:10 am
that interesting iam looking people for and that would and could work for me in programing and interesting place i should start looking i would like to be the next microsoft company start from srcatch