I took a job where I was the 4th employee at a start-up. The biggest selling point was they were willing to hire me despite my lack of web-dev experience. Coming from a .NET background, I had never used PHP until my interview. The interview involved setting up a MVC application and my interviewers were able to answer my technical questions succinctly. I realized they would be great people to learn from. I think the most important thing about hiring first employees is making sure everyone works well together.

I found the company thru craigslist, I'm not too sure if that applies to all cities, but Vancouver developer jobs show up regularly on CL.

So you were looking for work in a field where you had little experience. That makes a lot of sense. I suspect it's a common answer with less experienced employees.

The last three startups I was part of the early team at:

#4 - a hardware token that was going to be tied in with web services. A twist on security that interested me as well as a plethora of things to work on.

#9 - a group of people I had previously worked that also included some challenges specifically around some stringent performance requirements at scale.

#6 - a very heterogeneous environment that had me working in Java, in C/C++, on mobile. It included doing some ugly things involving Windows server.

I guess for me, the typical factor is a breadth of interesting problems to tackle.

Thinking about this after a thread on the Clojure 1.6 discussion. As a founder who will have to start hiring at some point, I'm really curious about what actually works, versus what I think will work.