David Connors, CEO & Co-Founder at The Swarm

Let's start with a little bit about your background and when you decided to start your journey as a founder

A quick word on what we're building: The Swarm is the first Network recruiting platform, allowing startups to combine and manage the connections of their team, investors, and advisors, to find top talent. Before forming the company, I ran a recruitment startup called Automately.io that was acquired by Sequoia Capital, where I was then the Director of Recruiting Operations. At Sequoia, I led a team that built and tested a series of recruiting tools for our early-stage portfolio companies. Our goal was to facilitate connections, referrals, and tap into the Sequoia network to give them an unfair advantage in building the right team. I realized the potential of harvesting individual team members networks into a collective intelligent network, something that traditional job boards, platforms like LinkedIn, or even the latest applicant tracking or interviewing solutions were never intended to do. The initial concept of The Swarm was born then.

What was your first MVP like and is it very different to the interface you have now?

We're currently at the MVP stage! You can actually get a good sense of the interface at theswarm.com/product/features We're lucky to have world-class designers and developers in our team, who have participated in building the JUMP (Uber) front- and back-end. Given the number of new tools out there, investing early in a great user experience is a must-have in my opinion. We've also interviewed 50+ founders in the process to make sure we build a product that meets their needs. We're going to continue and scale that feedback loop. We believe the product fundamentals are there, but the user flows will evolve quickly. Ultimately our product roadmap is going to be heavily influenced by our early adopters in the coming months!

Was there any tech tool that you really loved working with? Something you couldn't have made The Swarm without?

We're a remote-first company and we love that our tech stack is so fundamentally optimized and adapted to remote collaboration. Just to cite a few from brainstorming (Miro) to design (Figma) to dev (Confluence, Jira) and our marketing website (Webflow), they allow for rapid iterations and async collaboration. I don't think we're unique there, but we definitely couldn't have made The Swarm without them. As far as HR Tech is concerned, we actually find existing tools are behind compared to sales and martech stacks. So mostly we're very excited to create a best-in-class platform to make a difference in the startup recruiting world.

How did you get your first 50 users?

We're launching our pilot in three weeks! We already have over 800 companies signed up on our waitlist. In terms of growth, we've been focusing on building this waitlist, teasing the product to build awareness and momentum when we launch, and keeping them up-to-date on our progress. We have a product-led growth strategy, and we’re launching with a free and premium version of The Swarm.

Did your personal experiences guide you towards making The Swarm?

At Automately.io we managed the top-of-funnel outbound sourcing for founders. I noticed common challenges startups faced with recruiting, macro trends that were impacting their success, and the imperfect toolkit they had at their disposal. Founders often find that recruiting is taking up a huge chunk of their time (40-60% of their week). Some feel they are spending most of their time simply trawling through LinkedIn searching for potential candidates. For founders, already facing an enormous amount of work, this is an unacceptable time drain, effectively taking their attention away from other critical product- and company-building activities. While partnering with external agencies and vendors is an appealing shortcut and a definitive time-saver, the cost is high and their incentives aren’t always aligned.

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With the vast amount of resources available on the internet, accessing customers and connecting with investors has become easier than ever before. In many ways, there has never been a better time to start a company in certain industries. However, the above conditions have given birth to a huge wave of startups, flush with cash, competing with established tech giants for a relatively small pool of talented engineers, designers, product experts, and marketers. Connecting with the right talent is now harder than ever. Job market conditions are very dynamic and changing as you know right now, but we find it actually reinforces the competition for talent. People tend to be more demanding and competition for talent is actually still fiercer than ever. At Sequoia, I noticed there was a gap in the market for a product that I could recommend that would help our founders to leverage their networks and focus on the ‘warmest’ connections first before moving to ‘cold’ sources (like Linkedin and job boards). 

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We’re on a mission to provide startups with the knowledge and tools to unify and manage their networks to simplify, accelerate, and automate company-building… and we’re just getting started!

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