Anysphere raised $100M in December 2024 at a $2.5B valuation. They make Cursor, the AI code editor that every developer on Twitter seems to be using. At the time of the raise: 12 employees.
Go check their careers page. Check LinkedIn. Check Indeed. Check Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby.
Nothing. Zero public job posts. And yet they've hired 8 people in the last 4 months.
Why they don't post
This is normal. This is how most well-funded startups at the early stage hire. They don't post jobs because they don't need to, and frankly, posting creates more work than it saves.
They don't have time
12 people means no HR department. No recruiting ops. No dedicated talent team. The founders are shipping code, not writing job descriptions. Michael Truell at Anysphere reviews every PR himself. Writing a Lever posting and triaging 800 applications is not how he wants to spend his week.
They don't need to
Andreessen's talent team sends candidates directly. OpenAI engineers who want more equity and ownership reach out on their own. YC's internal Slack has a channel where founders share referrals. The pipeline fills itself through the network without a single posting going live.
They prefer stealth
A job post for "AI Agent Infrastructure Engineer" tells every competitor exactly what you're building next. Cursor's roadmap is competitive intelligence. GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Codeium are all watching. Why broadcast your hiring priorities to the market?
Public posts attract noise
If Cursor posts a role, they'll get 2,000+ applications. Most from people who haven't used the product. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. It's easier to hire through warm intros where someone they trust has already vetted the candidate.
How the hires actually happened
We talked to people close to Cursor's hiring. Their last 5 hires came from:
Two former Stripe engineers. Introduced by Patrick Collison after he saw what Cursor was building at a YC demo.
An ex-Figma designer. Referred by an angel investor who knew both teams. Never applied anywhere.
An MIT PhD. Cold emailed the founders about a specific technical problem with Cursor's context window handling. Got a reply in 2 hours.
A Notion engineer. Had been using Cursor daily for 3 months. Reached out saying he wanted to work on the product he couldn't stop using.
Notice what all 5 have in common: none of them applied through a job board. None of them found a posting on LinkedIn. The roles existed. The budget existed. The urgency existed. But the process was entirely through relationships and direct outreach.
It's not just Cursor
This pattern is everywhere at the early stage. We looked at 50 startups that raised $20M+ in the last 6 months with fewer than 30 employees. Here's what we found:
Nearly two-thirds had zero public job posts. But every single one of them hired at least 3 people within 90 days of the raise. The jobs existed. They were just invisible to anyone who only looks on job boards.
"We've hired 6 people this year. Zero job posts. I literally don't have time to manage inbound applications. When I need someone, I text 5 people I trust and ask who they know."
— Founder, $30M seed round
Where the jobs live
The jobs live in group chats, not job boards. They live in investor intros and founder DMs and "hey, know anyone good?" texts. They live in YC Slack channels and a16z's talent portal and first-round capital's network.
Job boards show you maybe 30% of the market. The other 70% is hidden. Not secret, exactly. Just invisible if you only look where everyone else looks.
The way in: find companies that just raised and reach out before they've even thought about posting. You don't need a referral. You need to show up with genuine interest at the right moment.
We find these companies. You reach out first.
See how it works