The People Who Showed Up
You don't find your first people through job postings. They find you.
Greg Schutta called because we'd worked together before and he believed in what I was describing. Not the tech — the stance. He's the one who makes sure things actually happen while I'm buried in code.
Jerick Evans showed up because he'd seen enough bad UX to know what good looks like, and he wanted to build something where design wasn't an afterthought bolted on after engineering was done.
Dave Rowett — we go way back. He's the one doing terraform and infrastructure at scale, and when I told him what I was building, his exact words were "I could not think of another person or opportunity I would be more excited about."
None of them needed a pitch deck. They needed to see that the work was real and the person behind it was serious. That's the only hiring strategy I know — do real work, and the right people notice.