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Migicovsky: Pebble Recruited Seven College Friends in Days Post-Kickstarter

Eric Migicovsky · A Conversation on Hard Tech with Eric Migicovsky · Y Combinator · Oct 12, 2018 · at 51:36

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky describes how he scaled Pebble's team immediately following their viral Kickstarter campaign.

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“Right after we kind of hit on Kickstarter, we were only two people at the company. Two full-time people and two interns, and so we had, like, nobody, and all of a sudden we needed to hire people, and we could have spent, you know, three to six months hiring a thirty-person team, and, you know, one, all, all these different, you know, people that we would need, hire experts that had done it before. We could have spent time doing that. We would have delayed our initial production by probably three to six months, however long it would have taken to hire that team. So what I did instead was I just phoned up Like some of my best friends from university who had been tangentially involved in the project and said, you need to quit your job and just fly here, and I think all of them, we just hired seven people within three or four days like that”

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