Dear [NAME] – Welcome to Homebrew! I’m so glad you decided to join our team. I’ve done a ton of hiring and truly believe People Choose Companies, not the other way around. You left an awesome gig and passed up lots of other options to bet on us, and I’ll work really hard to repay that 10x to you. But because you now have access to Homebrew’s Slack and are reading messages about this role, I wanted to admit something before you come across it on your own: I was originally pretty dead-set against bringing you on board. Not “you” in particular of course, but more so the idea of growing at all. I was worried it would impact our culture, increase complexity.

What changed my mind? A few things. As we begin investing out of our third fund, Satya and I believe there are now enough portfolio companies (and learnings from our work with them) to take portions of the help we provide one-off and think about how to scale it. We’ve also found that during the pre-investment process, certain types of diligence we do not just helps to qualify an investment but actually provides value to the entrepreneur and lets us hit the ground running post-close, so we want to increase our capacity to get that work done efficiently. But that’s the practical stuff that you read about in the spec. There’s also a host of benefits we believe our firm can realize by adding an additional POV around the table. That’s one reason we didn’t decide on a job title before hiring you – we wanted to collaboratively create the opportunity and make sure we were attracting people across a range of backgrounds and aspirations.

I’m also glad we got to know each other well during the process. As we’ve emphasized, Homebrew isn’t just a checkbook. We have strong beliefs about our model, especially how we can support the founders we back to build not just successful companies, but ones they are proud of. There’s a reason I have our logo as a tattoo and not just on my business card. I also appreciate that you admitted that you weren’t sure whether VC was something you even wanted to try out. Me too! I do venture because I do Homebrew, not the other way around.

So again, thanks for joining us. I know it’s going to be a great next few years and the impact you make on us and our investments is going to live on way beyond your tenure.

With warmth and respect,

Hunter

(oh hey, if it wasn’t clear, we’re hiring)