FoundingHunt vs Hacker News Who Is Hiring: how to choose
Use FoundingHunt when you want a focused search limited to human-reviewed founding-team roles, with equity figures labeled by where the number comes from and an application route to the employer. Use Hacker News Who Is Hiring when you want to read company-written posts and are willing to search each recurring thread, verify the role yourself, and follow each employer's instructions. Use both when a focused shortlist and a wider community scan fill different gaps.
FoundingHunt publishes this comparison and is one of the services in it. We applied the same questions to both workflows and explain where Hacker News may be the better fit. These are use-case recommendations based on the public evidence recorded for this review, not an independent ranking.
Compare at a glance
- Search and access
- FoundingHuntThe public jobs feed is a direct starting point for a curated set of founding-role listings. FoundingHunt says a human reviews a listing before it goes live, and the application route leads to the employer's destination.
- Hacker News: Who Is HiringThe official `whoishiring` account's submissions page lists recurring monthly threads, and the current September thread is publicly readable. The thread introduction also points searchers to separate indexing tools.
- Founding-role signal
- FoundingHuntThe published policy looks for early hires who build a company or establish a function with meaningful ownership. A “founding” title alone is not enough.
- Hacker News: Who Is HiringThe posting rules require the poster to be part of the hiring company and to be actively filling a position, but they do not restrict the thread to founding roles. Current posts include founding engineering roles alongside first sales, product, marketing, design and ordinary senior roles, so a title still needs scrutiny.
- Search controls
- FoundingHuntThe public board exposes role, stage, location and remote controls, with additional technology, industry, investor and visa filters available in the jobs experience. This review does not treat the filter set as a completeness guarantee.
- Hacker News: Who Is HiringThe official experience is a chronological thread of free-text company posts, not a set of role, stage, equity or location facets. The thread's own searcher guidance links to external tools, so discovering a match means scanning, using browser or external search, and reading the full post.
- Compensation and equity
- FoundingHuntFoundingHunt separates employer-disclosed numeric ranges as Verified Equity, benchmark ranges as Estimated Equity, and missing ranges as Equity unavailable. The individual job detail reviewed states cash and equity separately.
- Hacker News: Who Is HiringPosters choose what to disclose. In the reviewed current-thread sample, one founding-engineer post listed salary plus early equity, another listed equity plus discretionary cash for a fractional role, and a first-sales-leader post described commission-only compensation. The rules do not require a common compensation or equity field.
- Application path
- FoundingHuntJob details send the candidate to the employer's hiring destination rather than to an in-platform application inbox. The reviewed job detail provides the role and company context before that next step.
- Hacker News: Who Is HiringEach company sets its own next step. The sampled posts direct candidates to a founder or company email, a careers page, or a specified subject line, with no shared HN profile or application inbox.
- Location and freshness
- FoundingHuntLocation and work requirements are stated per employer. FoundingHunt says monitoring coverage varies, does not promise a universal recheck interval, and does not guarantee that a listing remains open.
- Hacker News: Who Is HiringThe thread rules ask posters to label location, REMOTE, country restrictions or ONSITE, and to post only for roles they are actively filling. Current posts still show different country, timezone, onsite and remote boundaries. The rules do not establish that every post remains open or follows the requested format.
Where each service fits
FoundingHunt
Curated founding-role job board.
- A good fit if
- You already want a founding-team role and prefer a focused, self-directed search across engineering, product, design, sales, marketing and operations, with role scope reviewed before publication.
- Main limitation
- A curated board is not a complete picture of startup hiring. Estimated Equity is a FoundingHunt Benchmark, not an employer offer, and a listing does not guarantee that the employer is still accepting applications.
- How to use it
- Start with your role, stage and location, then read the scope of each job rather than relying on its title. Check whether the equity number is employer-disclosed or a benchmark, follow the employer destination, and confirm the actual terms before treating the role as an opportunity.
Hacker News: Who Is Hiring
Recurring community hiring thread.
- A good fit if
- You want direct access to company-written posts, enjoy doing your own search, and are comfortable contacting a founder or hiring-company representative one post at a time.
- Main limitation
- The thread is not a founding-role board or a structured job database. Role scope, compensation, geography, application instructions and freshness vary by post, and the thread rules are not independent verification of every opening.
- How to use it
- Open the latest Who Is Hiring thread, search for your role and location terms, and read each promising post in full. Check who is hiring, what the role actually owns, the work location, pay and equity language, and the requested application route. Contact the poster only when you are genuinely interested.
When to use both
Use both when you want a focused founding-role search without giving up the chance to find a company that posts directly to the Hacker News community. FoundingHunt can narrow the first pass to reviewed founding-team roles and make the source of an equity number visible. Hacker News can surface a company or role that is not on FoundingHunt, with a direct line to the person who posted it. Neither channel proves that a particular role is right for you, and neither should replace checking the employer’s current terms.
Using both is also useful when you are deciding whether you want a founding role at all. Read the company-written posts for context on the actual work, then use FoundingHunt’s role pages and methodology to compare scope and compensation language. This is a way to gather different evidence, not a measured route to more interviews.
How the two workflows differ
Where the search starts. FoundingHunt starts with a curated role record. Hacker News starts with a monthly community thread. One asks the board to make founding scope part of the listing decision; the other asks you to decide whether each post describes the work you want.
Who does the screening. FoundingHunt’s published process includes human review before a listing goes live. Hacker News’ rules constrain who should post and ask employers to reply, but they do not amount to a role-by-role review. A company post can be useful evidence about what that company says it needs without proving the scope or outcome.
How information is shaped. FoundingHunt normalizes role, stage, location and equity labels so you can compare listings. HN posts are written by different people in different formats. That can reveal useful detail, but it also means salary, equity, seniority and responsibilities may be missing or described in incompatible ways.
How you apply. FoundingHunt gives you a job detail page and then takes you to the employer’s destination. On HN, you follow the instruction in the post, which may be an email, a company careers page or another application route. Read the instruction carefully and make sure you are contacting the actual hiring company.
How freshness works. HN’s monthly cadence gives you a clear thread to revisit, while the individual post’s age and the employer’s reply determine what you can infer about availability. FoundingHunt records the evidence available at review time and describes its monitoring limitations. In both cases, confirm the opening directly before investing in an application.
A practical way to run the search
- Write down your constraints. Note the function you want to own, location and work authorization, minimum cash compensation, preferred company stage, and the questions you need an employer to answer.
- Build a focused first pass on FoundingHunt. Browse founding roles or a relevant role page, then read the role scope and equity label. Use the methodology to understand what Verified Equity, Estimated Equity and Equity unavailable mean.
- Scan the current HN thread. Search for terms such as “founding,” “first hire,” your function, your stack and your location. Treat the search words as discovery aids, not proof that a role has founding scope.
- Read the whole post. Look for who owns the product or function, what already exists, who the role reports to, and what the first months should accomplish. A founding title is a lead, not a conclusion.
- Verify the offer and destination. Confirm salary, equity source, vesting, dilution, exercise terms, employment status, work location and visa requirements with the employer. Follow the stated application route and keep a record of what was current when you applied.
What to confirm with the employer
- Is this role establishing a function, joining an existing one, or replacing someone?
- Which decisions are mine, and which remain with the founders or an established team?
- What product, customers, funding and team context can you substantiate?
- Is the equity number employer-disclosed, a benchmark, an estimate, or still undecided?
- What are the salary, vesting, exercise, dilution and work-location terms of the actual offer?
- Is the role still open, and who will receive and review my application?
For more context, browse founding designer jobs, founding product manager jobs, founding sales jobs or founding marketing jobs. Read our guides to equity offers and red flags in founding roles. Engineers can also compare founding and senior engineering roles.
Corrections
If a service description or source is wrong, email support (at) foundinghunt.com with the page URL and supporting evidence. We can review the correction. A changed or unavailable source alone does not prove that an employer has stopped hiring.