Getting the Right People in the Room

What happens when you can't compete on salary, benefits, or stability

The morning after we closed our first real funding, I realized something terrifying: I had to hire people. And I had no idea how.

I was 26. I’d never managed anyone. The only hiring I’d done was picking up riders off the street. But now we needed engineers. Real ones. People who would build something thousands depended on.

Here’s the math that kept me up: Newscred was hiring engineers in Dhaka for $3-4000. We could pay $300. Maybe $400 if we stretched. Plus equity that might be worth something. Or nothing.

We weren’t selling jobs. We were selling a bet.

The Corporate Transplant Who Couldn’t

Six months in, we thought we’d gotten smart. We hired someone from British American Tobacco, one of the biggest public companies in the country. He had the resume. Ten years of experience. Manager title. References that glowed.

He lasted three weeks.

The problem wasn’t his skills. It was everything else. At BAT, when he needed something, he sent an email to a department. At Pathao, if the printer broke, you either fixed it yourself or it stayed broken. When he hit a problem with ops, he wanted to schedule a meeting for next Tuesday. We needed an answer in the next hour.

“Where’s the marketing team?” he asked one day.

“You’re looking at him,” I said, pointing to myself.

He thought I was joking.

At big companies, people have lanes. You do your job, stay in your box, go home. At startups, if something needs to happen and you’re the closest person, it’s your problem now. This guy kept waiting for someone else to handle things. There was no one else.

They’re just conditioned for a different game. And you can’t de-program ten years of corporate conditioning in three weeks. We needed people who were already wired for chaos.

The Questions That Actually Mattered

In Bangladesh, hiring was its own category of impossible. In Silicon Valley, if you’re building something interesting, talented people will take a bet on you. In Dhaka, talented people want safety. Their parents want safety. Their in-laws have opinions. Society has expectations.

“My parents think startups are a scam,” one candidate told me during an interview.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think what you are doing is exciting - and I would rather do this than be a paper pusher”

I hired him.

You can’t screen for skills in a 45-minute interview. You can screen for something else, desperation in a good way. The hunger to build something that matters more than the fear of it failing.

I started asking different questions.

“Tell me about a time you failed and no one bailed you out.”

“If this company dies in six months, what do you want to have learned?”

“What’s the worst job you’ve ever had, and why did you stay?”

The answers told me everything. If someone talked about failure and blamed everyone else, they weren’t going to survive here. If they couldn’t articulate what they wanted to learn, they just wanted a paycheck. If they’d never stayed anywhere uncomfortable, they’d leave the second things got hard.

I also learned to test for adaptability. I’d give people a problem mid-interview. Something broken. A bug, a customer complaint, a logistics nightmare. I didn’t care if they solved it. I cared about whether they panicked or got curious.

The best hire we ever made was a kid who’d been freelancing, building websites for small businesses. His code was messy. His resume was two lines. But when I asked him how he’d handle a system going down during rush hour, he didn’t freeze. He asked three clarifying questions, sketched a plan on the whiteboard, admitted what he didn’t know, and said, “I’d figure it out.”

Within a year, he was leading a team.

Screening for Culture When Culture Is All You Have

In the beginning, culture isn’t something you write on a wall. It’s how you act when no one’s watching. It’s what you tolerate and what you don’t.

We didn’t have a handbook. But we had patterns.

If you screwed up and hid it, you were gone. If you screwed up and told everyone so we could fix it together, you stayed. If you needed someone to tell you what to do every hour, you didn’t fit. If you saw something broken and fixed it without asking permission, you were gold.

The cultural filter also came down to something uniquely Bangladeshi: how people talked about their families. In our culture, you don’t make career decisions alone. Your parents have a vote. Your spouse has a vote. Sometimes your uncle has a vote.

So during interviews, I started asking: “What did your family say when you told them you were applying here?”

If they lied and said everyone was supportive, I knew they hadn’t told their family. If they said their family was worried but they were doing it anyway, that told me something about their conviction. If they said they were still figuring out how to tell their parents, I respected the honesty, but I also knew they’d probably leave in three months when the pressure got too much.

The people who lasted weren’t the ones with the best degrees. They were the ones who’d already decided that approval mattered less than building something real.

Fighting Your Family to Join a Startup

The bigger battle wasn’t convincing candidates. It was convincing their parents.

In Bangladesh, there are exactly three acceptable career paths: doctor, engineer at a multinational, or banker. Startup founder? That’s what unemployed people call themselves.

I’d sit across from brilliant engineers who wanted to join us, and they’d say, “I need to talk to my family first.” A week later: “My dad says it’s too risky.” Or worse: “My mom is crying.”

This wasn’t unique to Bangladesh. But the intensity was different. Most of our potential hires were 24, 25, unmarried, living with their parents. Parental approval wasn’t a courtesy, it was a requirement.

I started inviting parents to the office. Showing them the space. Explaining the vision. Assuring them their son wasn’t joining a scam. It felt absurd. But it worked. Because once parents saw we were real, they relaxed.

The ones who joined anyway, against family pressure, became the core team. Because they’d already proven they could handle the hardest conversation they’d ever have. Everything else was easy by comparison.

Screening for the Invisible Resume

I stopped caring about credentials fast. Resumes told me where someone went to school. They didn’t tell me if they’d debug a server crash at 2 a.m.

I started asking three questions:

“Tell me about something you built that failed.” If someone couldn’t name a failure, they either hadn’t tried anything hard or couldn’t admit mistakes. Both were disqualifying.

“What’s the hardest argument you’ve had with a teammate?” This revealed whether they could disagree without being disagreeable. Whether they took feedback or got defensive.

“If we shut down in a year, what would you want to have learned?” This separated people chasing paychecks from people chasing growth.

I also watched how they treated our receptionist, our tea-maker, our junior staff. If you’re polite to me but dismissive to someone you think is “below” you, you don’t fit.

Netflix famously says they hire “fully formed adults.” We couldn’t afford that. We hired hungry, humble people who wanted to become something.

The People Who Stayed

Some of the best people we hired left. Better offers. More stability. And that’s fine. Not everyone is built for chaos.

But the ones who stayed weren’t there because we paid the most. They stayed because they felt ownership. When someone asked what they did, they didn’t say “I work at Pathao.” They said “I built Pathao.”

That’s the only hiring strategy that matters when you have nothing to offer: find people who want to build something, not just work somewhere. Give them a reason to care. Then get out of their way.

The founding team gets the credit. But the early team builds the company. The people who stayed when everything broke, when we couldn’t make payroll on time, when customers were screaming and competitors were poaching our riders, those people made Pathao real.

Skills can be taught. Belief can’t. And in the beginning, belief is the only currency that survives a crisis.