Looking for feedback from my knowledgeable friends.

Friends of friends are the best, but once that's tapped out, searching github for "People who have cloned and made commits to relevant repos". (We did this with some success at Ksplice with linux-2
6.git)

Friends of friends are good, but Dropbox got along pretty well with plain-old friends. The upside is that it's often easier to know before hiring what type of person you're gonna get. The downside is that when things go wrong (with either the company's performance or the employee's) the personal relationship often degrades along with the business relationship.

What should I do when all of my friends are like you - looking to be founders - and I'm looking for employee #2.

People looking to be founders may well be a lost cause, at least until they get a solid failure under their belt. But you're probably looking the wrong place for an early employee anyway.

Experienced people who are really good can generally command high salaries *and* large equity grants at companies even coming in around employee #10-#20. So those folks will only join a more speculative startup if they're founder level, to get the risk/reward ratio right.

The best first employees are actually less experienced (or at least less confident of their skill). You wanna find people who haven't yet done a startup, or maybe even haven't worked in industry at all. Ex: people who are fed up with big company software, grad school, finance, ...

Or you can hire people as early employees, but still call them "co-founder," which can work sometimes.

"Right out of school" or "people who are bored of big company software" have both worked for us. My big gripe about Silicon Valley is that every engineer there seems to feel entitled to go start his or her own startup, rather than joining yours -- which is not the case as much in Boston.

(Is this public?)

So I'm in this intermediate position where I don't really know anyone right out of school and I do know people who are very experienced (and are hard to recruit). It has been hard.

I have no idea if it's public. I also can't really tell how branch is different from a thread on any commenting system (other than having a nicer UI).

(yup, this is public)

Pretty obvious but worth mentioning — a lot of new grads are excited about joining startups. You probably still have ties to the Princeton CS department; that would be a good place to look, once you've tapped out friends / friends-of-friends.

(It looks like you can't edit or delete past posts either?)