Where do savvy startups go when they need fresh tech talent? You’d assume that those in Silicon Valley don’t have to go very far, but not Akash Nigam, co-founder of Valley-based messaging app Blend, who has focused his talent-spotting efforts on that other global tech hub, Romania.
The country's troubled past and extremes of economic hardship consigned to history, its capital Bucharest is now home to a vibrant start up sector and a vast talent pool of highly skilled engineers. But why travel 6,500 miles to hire, when San Francisco’s tech talent hotbed is on your doorstep?
“San Francisco tech talent is a double edged sword,” he says. “There are definitely talented engineers in the area, but an increasingly higher percentage of them are profiling as Ferraris and in reality, are simply only Hondas. And that’s when you’re trying to hire one individual at a time; building an entire team of all stars who don’t know each other is risky. This type of talent is also less likely to endure through adversity, with the likes of
Nigam, the son of WebMD cofounder Pavan Nigam, along with two friends Matt Geiger and Evan Rosenbaum, had started working on Blend whilst at college. Convinced that even in the crowded group messaging app space their product outshone leading players like WhatsApp and
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“The incubator's value proposition was to provide your small team with a full-fledged engineering team in Bucharest to bring your idea to fruition,” says Nigam. “We could have easily coded a rough MVP version of Blend ourselves, but there was a massive appeal around having cross-platform advantage with a fully fleshed out team from day one."
The three then decided to roll the dice and move to Bucharest for the summer to check things out for themselves, and were floored by what they found. “The difference between us three trying to hack something average versus building a legitimate company with a group of experienced individuals was monumental," says Nigam. "We ended up launching and drawing enough traction to eventually raise a seed round. Taking inspiration from WhatsApp and their operations in Russia, we struck a deal to hire the team as full-time Blend employees. To date, this has been the best decision our company has ever made.”
Despite the risk, the superiority of the remote talent led the team to change their business infrastructure and open a second Blend office in Romania in order to accommodate employees who were unable to obtain visas. Some of the notable talent brought on by Blend include Radu Prescura, co-founder of Style Jukebox, Alex Hortopan, founder of Catalyst WorldWide, and Alex Tau, whose app Phranslator has topped the rankings in France, Italy, and Israel.
“One of the most important things we did was to move everyone from Bucharest to San Francisco for six months,” says Nigam. “It was imperative for us to have everyone under the same roof to build Blend's culture and understand each other inside and out. This paid off tremendously and we were able to build the systems that allow us to smoothly function as a company, irrespective of time zone.”
When everyone moved back to Bucharest, co-founder Evan Rosenbaum also moved there full-time to make the transition seamless and help keep the Blend culture intact. As a result, says Nigam, it doesn’t feel like a ‘remote’ team. “Even though we are separated by the Atlantic, everyone at Blend is still very close, constantly interacting with one another via Slack, FaceTime, and of course, our own app. It takes effort but I'd argue that our Blend family is closer than most companies who are all in one location.”
They are also seeing other Valley startups moving along the same trend, primarily because they are recognising that the talent needed to build something amazing requires experience.
Nigam says: “Much of the available talent for hire in San Francisco are students out of college, who expect to get paid top dollar but haven’t pushed product level code a single day in their lives. Eastern Europe differs in that there is plenty of talent still available with 10 to 15 years’ experience under their belt and a bunch of similarly talented friends interested in coming along for the ride.”
Investors, too, are enthused by the idea of the remote start-up team model. Blend has raised over $9million capital from key investors that include NEA, CAA, and Foundation Capital.
“They love it and have begun recommending this model to some of their portfolio companies,” says Nigam. “It was a gamble at first. We wanted the benefits of a massive engineering team but knew it would take a tremendous amount of effort and care to pull off. This could have easily imploded if we didn’t go the extra mile to make sure it felt like we are constantly in the same room.”
The Blend team has expanded to around 20 people and is expected to double in size over the next two quarters. Earlier this year it launched its first desktop platform for Mac, complementing the app's existing mobile and web platforms. Not yet into the profit-making zone, Nigam says their focus right now is purely on user growth.
He says: “This is world class talent and many of our Bucharest employees have been with us for over two years. We could have easily hired a team in San Francisco, but we chose to have our engineering core in Bucharest because it’s simply better than anything on the market, more prolific than your quintessential college hackers and far more nimble than your typical corporate team. This is our team for life.”
