One of you needs to take it.
That was my pitch to two former Beatport teammates. Reality Check needed an infrastructure engineer, and I had made both of them the same offer.
The package included help relocating to New York, a company MetroCard, and a gym membership. I even offered a small extra incentive if one person accepted and convinced the other to come too.
It was half recruiting strategy and half me trying to rebuild a team I already knew could work together.
At Beatport, we had taken a relatively small music store and operated it through years of growth. The work was physical and technical: racks, networks, storage, databases, deployments, late-night failures, and whatever new capacity the business needed next.
Reality Check had a different customer base, but many of the problems were familiar. The company ran managed hosting infrastructure and wanted to grow into stronger network, storage, and cloud services. I needed people who could do more than close tickets. They had to help design the next system.
Trust shortened that conversation. I knew how both people thought. They knew what it was like to work for me. Nobody had to pretend the job would be calm or perfectly defined.
The hard part was location. They were in Denver. The work was in New York and could not be done entirely from a laptop. Saying yes meant a new company and a new city.
I kept the chat direct. Here is the offer. Here is what I can add. I made the other person the same deal. One of you needs to take it.
The response was not an immediate yes. It was a “hmm,” followed by a question about what the other person had said.
That was enough to keep the conversation going.