What caught my eye on my Gmail chat window was this message: “Hiring: $1500 Referral Fee.” I had not seen that kind of message in a long time. Why, it reminded me of the mid 1990s when companies could not find the right people and it was not uncommon for companies to offer a referral fee for the right candidate. But, these are different times and I was curious to find out why Vikas Gupta, co-founder of Jambool, was offering $1500 as referral fee for hiring engineers for his startup.Here is the Q&A with Vikas.

KB:  $1500 as referral fee for hiring engineers? Do you find there there is a dearth of good engineers for hire?

VG:  Yes, there is always a dearth of good engineers. Our hiring bar is very high, and $1500 is a very low cost to pay for getting that kind of talent. We’ve always found that referrals get the best candidates and we just created a small incentive to drive that. Every one of our hires so far is a superstar, and we plan to only raise the bar.

KB: With this economic downturn and layoffs one would think that it might be relatively easy to find the right talent. What have you uncovered in your search for hiring engineers?

VG: We’ve seen an increase in people available and looking to get hired. We’ve been able to negotiate better rates with recruiters, they have more candidates to refer, and we’ve seen an increase in resumes being posted. However, the talent we are looking for is still hard to come by.

KB: What kind of engineers are you looking to hire? How many?

VG: We are looking for several engineers who raise the bar on our team, have a strong CS background, enjoy hard technical challenges, and take pride in delivering high quality products. We are building a developer facing platform for virtual economies, and the skills we value include strong analytical abilities, secure programming, robust scalable system design and the hunger to create something unique, powerful and useful.

KB: What will be their role? What kinds of skills sets do they need?

VG: Their role will be to own and build components of our platform, and make it succeed for our customers. We are building a virtual economy platform for online games and communities. It is an extremely interesting space with many small to big challenging problems. People we hire must be able to program in more than one language. Background in building fraud detection systems, multi player games, self-learning systems, and data mining is a huge plus.

KB: What is your philosophy behind hiring people?

VG: For most part, we hire people whom we respect and who will help raise the bar in the company. And it is pretty hard given that in our current team most were superstars in their roles at companies like Amazon.com. Culture fit is an important factor as well. We don’t necessarily hire people to fill specific roles — in fact most people we hire will end up playing more than one role. We believe that given the early stage of our company, the people we hire will be critical in determining our success or failure. It is also important that these people be able to deliver at a frenetic pace, without ever compromising the quality of the product. At the end of the day, you have to be passionate about what you are building for your customers.

KB: VCs and other entrepreneurs will tell you that finding the right team and having the right chemistry are two key factors for the growth of a young startup. What is your opinion about this? What comes first? Chemistry or the right qualifications?

VG: Qualifications and ability to deliver come first. Chemistry isn’t going to do much if the person you hire isn’t qualified to be there, or isn’t able to deliver. Chemistry is important, and that also sets your company culture very early on. Chemistry helps in binding the team together into a larger force — but you have to earn your place in that team first.

KB: Tighten your belt for the dark times ahead and reserve your cash, and focus on generating revenue are some of the things that you are hearing from Sand Hill Road and other investors. How have you planned for the next 18-24 month in terms of cash, generating revenue and growing the company? Are you generating revenue?

VG: We raised money recently, so we aren’t immediately looking to raise another round. We are a frugal company and have been so since the inception. We started with almost no funds, and were able to build a successful company with positive cash flow. Frugality, I would say, is in our company’s DNA. 

Our focus is on building great products that delight users, and do wonders for our partners. We are building the killer platform for game developers — a virtual economy platform that can help them create, grow and monetize a thriving, long lasting community.

We are generating revenue. And we are helping other developers generate revenue as well. Our focus for the foreseeable future is to continue to create more value for our partners, and a compelling experience for our users. In the process, we do expect to grow our revenues as well, as we expand our distribution.

KB: The last time we spoke to you, your company was one of the top Facebook developers. Where are you placed today? Are you doing anything different now?

VG: A while ago we decided to step back and look at what we had learnt building these apps, and  where we wanted to take our company given our expertise. The natural move for us was to focus on building a developer facing virtual economy platform. It taps into our abilities as a company and team. People on our team built the payment systems at Amazon.com, and built some of the most successful applications on Facebook.

KB: Have you ever been through an economic downturn or ever got a pink slip in your professional career?

VG: I was at Amazon when the dot com bubble burst. We went through those times feeling very uncertain about what the future had in store for us as a company. But, luckily Amazon did well and continues to do so. And though we had hiring freezes, we still made room for exceptional candidates. That is the philosophy we are following in our startup.

As others have pointed out, some of the best companies get started in such times, and these tough times sometimes create the right environment for your startup to succeed.

KB: Anything else you would like to add?

VG:  Yes — we are looking for talented, rock star software engineers who would enjoy solving some deep technical problems at large scale, and would particularly enjoy building online economies. We are based in San Francisco and Seattle, and are looking for people in either location. You can reach us at contact -at- jambool. If you are a game developer, or have an online community, we can help you with an economy platform that helps you grow, engage and monetize. 

Earlier this year we did our first interview with Jambool.

Jambool, Vikas Gupta, Facebook, San Francisco Bay Area, technology, hiring, engineers. startup