How Did Parallel Hire Its First Team?

Parag Agrawal hired Parallel's first team in stealth by calling people himself and keeping more than half the team new, not people he had already worked with. Nobody knew he was starting a company, so he got no inbound calls.

For almost a year before hiring for Parallel truly started, he met people while exploring ideas and asked a standard question: who are the best three people you have ever worked with? He went and met some of them. The initial founding team was Agrawal plus six other people, and half were people he had not previously known, reached because they sat among the top three of someone he already thought was exceptional. The same network-hiring path later brought in talent from outside his starting network at Twitter.

Parallel is at 40 or 50 people. He is hiring as fast as the company can across every function, with energy on engineering, GTM, and newer needs in marketing and developer relations.