The First 10 Hires: A Startup Hiring Playbook
Your first 10 hires set the trajectory of your company for years. Hire wrong and you burn cash, slow down, and spend months undoing cultural damage. Hire right and you move twice as fast as you expected.
Here is the order that works for most startups. Adapt it to your situation, but think carefully before deviating.
Hires 1-2: Engineers
You need people who build. Full-stack if possible. Senior enough to work without hand-holding. At this stage, every person on the team should be writing code or talking to customers. Ideally both.
Do not hire junior developers as your first engineers. You do not have time to mentor. You need people who can ship a feature end-to-end while you are in a customer call.
Hire 3: Designer or Second Product Person
Depends on your product. If it is design-heavy and consumer-facing, get a designer who can also do basic frontend. If it is data-heavy B2B, another engineer will move you faster.
Hires 4-5: More Engineers
You still need to build faster than you think. The biggest regret I hear from founders at this stage is "we should have hired engineers sooner." Feature velocity at pre-seed is everything.
Hire 6: Your First Non-Technical Hire
Usually sales if you are B2B, or community and support if you are B2C. Someone who talks to customers every single day. Not a marketer. Not a growth hacker. Someone who sits in the trenches with your users and tells you what is broken.
This hire changes your company. Suddenly the founders are not the only ones hearing customer feedback. That is when things start moving faster.
Hires 7-8: Fill the Gaps
By now you know what is breaking. Maybe it is marketing. Maybe it is operations. Maybe you desperately need someone who understands your infrastructure. Hire for the pain you feel today, not the pain you imagine for next year.
Hires 9-10: Specialists
The roles that were held together by duct tape and founder willpower. A dedicated DevOps person. A content marketer. A customer success manager. These are the hires that let you stop firefighting and start scaling.
Who to NOT Hire Early
A VP of anything. You do not need management layers at five people.
A recruiter. Not until you are hiring two or more people per month consistently.
A CFO. Use software. Track your burn rate in a dashboard.
An office manager. Work from home or a coworking space.
A PR firm. Nobody cares about your press at this stage. Build the product.
Equity for Early Hires
Employee #1-3: 1-2% each
Employee #4-7: 0.5-1% each
Employee #8-10: 0.25-0.5% each
All on 4-year vesting with 1-year cliff. Adjust for role criticality. Read more about equity structures.
Where to Find Them
Your network first. Always. The best early hires come through personal connections. Then AngelList, LinkedIn, and Hacker News "Who's Hiring" threads.
Recruiting agencies burn cash and rarely understand what early-stage means. Save them for when you have a real HR budget.
One rule above all others: every early hire should be someone you would trust to represent the company alone. Because at this size, they will.
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