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.
