How to get hired at a startup when you don't know anyone
An intermediate step between &quot;send in a resume and cover letter that no one reads&quot; and &quot;send in an unsolicited blow-their-minds project&quot;, which may well bounce off the same spam or attention filter which bounces a resume, is &quot;convince one person in the company that they want you to apply there.&quot;<p>This is much, much less difficult than engineers think it is.  People with hiring authority are on the same Internet you are.  They use the same email &#x2F; Twitter &#x2F; etc.  THEY WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU.  Engineers are in incredible demand.<p>They get a steady stream of resumes from people who are wildly unqualified for the job.  That is one reason why they&#x27;re not going to read your resume when you send it in unless their prior expectation is that you&#x27;re interesting.<p>It is not harder to be interesting than &quot;someone I&#x27;ve never heard of or met.&quot;   &quot;Hey Bob, I watched your presentation at $CONFERENCE last year on Youtube.  Great stuff; loved what you did with $FOO, in particular $COMMENT_PROVING_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOU&#x27;RE_TALKING_ABOUT.  I&#x27;m also a $FOO developer.  Do you have a few minutes to chat on Thursday about what you guys are doing?&quot;<p>You&#x27;re not proposing marriage here.  You&#x27;re asking for 15 minutes to get to know them.  You do not have to author a heartbreaking work of staggering genius to make this call happen.<p>Your goal for the chat: get Bob enthusiastic enough to either suggest &quot;Hey you should apply here&quot; or be receptive to you suggesting &quot;Hey, I really like what you&#x27;re doing, and would like to see if I could be a part of it.  Can you get the ball rolling for me?&quot;<p>n.b. If you want to knock someone&#x27;s socks off with a demo of e.g. an application which uses their API, use the above to get one person enthusiastic about reviewing the demo, <i>then</i> implement.  If you can&#x27;t get one person enthusiastic about the prospect of looking at your work, there&#x27;s sharply limited odds that actually doing the work meaningfully advances your interests.