Who do I recruit for my startup?

I bumped into 3 blogs on recruiting for stratups today, all had their own good aspects to them. Recruiting is a topic that really excites me and there's no better way to vent all that excitement than to blog about it! My prospective partner - Akshat and me were on the verge of starting up last year (long story why it didn't actually happen) and recruitment was a highly discussed topic at the time since we had limited monetary resources and were probably younger and lesser qualified than most people we needed to recruit. We imagined the kind of person who we'd like to have on our team and the criteria based on which we would select. There were a hundred reasons why most people would laugh at the prospect of working for us. But there were a few extremely strong reasons because of which a few people would join us and they'd actually be a hundred times better than all those people who would laugh. That's the great thing about recruiting for a startup, you usually wouldn't want to hire the people who don't think its a good idea to work for you.

Our first project was estimated to take 4 months to complete and was during the summer internship period of all major universities in India. We needed 2 programmers to work for us so we decided to make a trip to a couple of the best engineering schools and sell our idea to the prospective hires. The great thing about hiring interns in our case was that 1. they are cheap so we could compete and outbeat most internship stipends, 2. we had probably the most challenging and exciting internship project work to offer in the country and 3. On successful completion of the first project, we have great people to make employment offers to.

We didn't actually list it them out at the time but I think the following are the top 3 recruiting criteria for a startup:

1. Hire someone who believes in your idea. You are giving up a stable job, risking your career, investing a lot of money and time and still working your ass off for a reason - you believe in your idea and that your startup is the next big thing to happen to the industry. You need to have people on board who believe in it too. You most probably won't beat the big boys in terms of offering a better compensation or job stability but what you are providing is an opportunity to have a slice of the big success that your venture will be. As Guy puts it - the person needs to be "infected with a love for the product". If your employees can each carry a slice of the dream in their pockets, they will work for you and continue working for you no matter what!
2. Look for "entrepreneural instincts". You need people on board who will be ready play the tough game when the crunch time comes. In a startup things aren't going to be hunky dorey every single day as in the case of larger corporations who have the ability to absorb the risks when things aren't going great. There will be times when resources and deadlines will be crunched and you need all your players to stand up and deliver. It is in times like these that true entrepreneural instincts come to the fore. Entrepreneurs, unlike those who aren't, don't point to the agreed upon hours per week in the contract when the situation demands the extra effort. They do what it takes to "get it done" and don't leave when the next client is hard to find.
3. Hire people who are crazy about what they do - Someone who takes her/his work a little too seriously. As Paul Graham puts it, hire people who are animals at what they do! If your hiring a sales person, hire someone who never takes no for an answer, and loves selling so much that he/she will be willing and successful at it, even when when woken up in the middle of the night to sell to a client half way across the globe. "If you think about people you know, you'll find the animal test is easy to apply. Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence -so-and-so is an animal. If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup."-Paul Graham.