Comment by cjbarber

1. Twitter: Founders and employees of early stage startups are often on twitter.

2. Portfolios of great angel investors and VC firms.

3. Emailing people you admire, eg investors, founders, or engineers.

4. Write down your friends and past and current colleagues who you think are a) most likely to be successful and b) you’d most enjoy working with. Or even just who you most like, trust, and admire. Then see where they work. And ask them about other companies they know. The simplest version of this is go on LinkedIn, and browse your network, and click to check out the companies all of your past classmates and colleagues work at.

5. Go to events that would have interesting technologists in your field (ie the areas where you have skill and taste, so you can pick who you admire), and ask them where they work, and which startups they’ve been impressed by. Talks, conferences, meetups, maker spaces.

6. Biased self-promotion: I’m kind of obsessed with interesting startups and sometimes share lists of startups, eg https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957834156794343730 and https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957446016950816866

7. HN who is hiring thread: there are lots of interesting ones there, you’ll just want to dig through to find them.

8. Look up university career fair company lists to see which companies are hiring, if they’re hiring new grads and interns then they’re very likely hiring senior engineers too.

9. Podcasts: some technologists have great podcasts, so do some investors and VC firms.

10. Search for startups founded by alumni from your school, you’re more likely to have alumni second degree connections there.

I’ll note that investors get many bets, employees get one at a time. So you need a higher bar. Meeting in person is particularly high signal.

My tip for filtering companies is to spend as much time as possible in person with the team before accepting an offer, ideally at least on 3+ separate occasions, with 3+ separate people. If there’s doubt, skip. This is also why it’s so good to start by identifying your most impressive friends and colleagues and see where they work, because you start with that high trust filter.