I was contacted by one of the founders directly through linkedin because of some of my previous experience. You get a lot of spam linkedin emails, some of them funny, but he had clearly read my profile, which was a good start. I met the two founders for coffee and I was very impressed by their vision and plan for the company. That, and that fact they were nice people, convinced me that it would be a great place to work. Follow up interview with the technical lead. We discussed their technical challenges and possible solutions, previous projects I had worked on and some open source projects. At no point did they try to put pressure on me or assert their power through tricky questioning, but I was reassured that they were taking hiring very seriously (i.e. future colleagues would be nice to work with!).