Who should your first startup hires be?

There is a temptation after raising your first meaningful round of capital to start building an organisation chart. Engineering. Product. Sales. Marketing. Customer Success. Operations. Then the hiring begins.

But the first ten people in a startup are not simply a smaller version of the team you expect to have at 100 employees. At this stage, the company is still discovering what customers really want, which assumptions are wrong, which route to market works and where its genuine competitive advantage lies. Your earliest employees therefore need to help discover the business as well as execute within it.

That shift matters. Venture-backed companies are increasingly building leaner by design, which means each early hire carries more weight. Carta's 2026 compensation and headcount data makes the trend clear: smaller teams are becoming the norm, not an exception.

Don't start with the job title. Start with what the company needs to prove.

One of the least useful questions a founder can ask is: “What role should we hire next?”

A better question is: “What does the company need to achieve next that the current team cannot reliably do?” Then work backwards from that.

The sequencing should come from the next business milestone, not somebody else's startup playbook.

Y Combinator co-founder and Gusto co-founder Tomer London describes a similar approach: identify the two or three “superpowers” the company needs in order to differentiate, then recruit people who possess them. His seed-stage hiring advice is a useful reminder that early hiring is about strengthening the company's edge, not filling a conventional org chart.

Sometimes the right answer is: don't hire yet.

Hiring is not always the solution. One of the biggest early-stage mistakes is recruiting a senior specialist to solve a problem the founders have not yet understood themselves.

Cristina Cordova, who worked at Stripe before becoming an early leader at Notion, has made this point in the context of unfamiliar functions. If a founder has not established whether a marketing problem is really product marketing, developer marketing, performance marketing or something else, it is difficult to define the right senior hire in the first place. Her broader lesson is useful across functions: get close enough to the problem to know what good looks like before you hire somebody to own it.

The objective is not to perform every function forever. It is to understand the problem well enough to recognise the person who can take it further than you can.

The first ten need a different profile.

Large companies can hire people into relatively stable systems. There is normally a defined manager, established process, recognised brand, supporting functions and reasonably clear boundaries around the role.

Early startups offer far less of that. That means someone who has been exceptional inside a mature organisation will not automatically be exceptional as employee number seven.

For the earliest hires, five characteristics matter disproportionately:

1. Exceptional strength

The person should be unusually good at something the business genuinely needs. Early-stage companies have limited capacity for average performance in critical roles.

2. High slope

Look for evidence that somebody learns quickly, earns wider responsibility and has progressed faster than their environment would normally predict. Andreessen Horowitz's guidance on founding teams similarly points to high-slope candidates as potentially strong startup hires, particularly where established-company experience can otherwise mask how much infrastructure surrounded the person. A16z's founding-team guide is particularly useful on this distinction.

3. Range

Their job description will change. A founding salesperson may also help shape pricing, qualification, partnerships, customer feedback and the eventual sales hiring plan. A founding engineer may spend more time talking to customers than they expected.

4. Agency

Early hires should see problems and act without waiting for a mature operating system to tell them what to do next.

5. Belief

The first employees are accepting genuine career and financial risk. They need to understand why this particular company, team and moment are worth taking that risk for.

Hire for the stage you're entering, not the company you hope to become.

This becomes particularly important with leadership hires. Founders naturally want impressive people, and a candidate from a globally recognised technology company can reassure investors, employees and sometimes the founders themselves.

But pedigree and stage fit are not the same thing.

Has this person operated successfully through the stage we're about to enter?

Someone who successfully led a large function at a $500m ARR company may be excellent, but that does not automatically make them the right person to build the same function from zero. Ask what existed around them: brand, inbound demand, management layers, recruiters, RevOps, established customers, marketing and budget.

The better early-stage candidate may have the less famous employer but much more relevant evidence of building without those advantages.

The founder should still be heavily involved.

Recruiting the first team is not something founders should simply hand over. Researchers, recruiters, investors and your network can help identify exceptional people, but the founder remains uniquely capable of explaining why the company exists and why joining now could matter.

A16z describes recruiting as a core company-building activity, not a support task to be dealt with after the “real work” is done. Their guidance also emphasises that candidates are assessing the company throughout the process: the founder has to understand what matters to the candidate and build conviction on both sides.

Particularly for the first ten people, a candidate should leave the process understanding:

• Why this company?
• Why now?
• Why these founders?
• Why this role?
• What will I actually own?
• What happens if this works?

A recruiter can help shape and communicate that story. They cannot replace the founder in it.

The job description will change. Make that explicit.

Another frequent cause of problems is not hiring the wrong person. It is hiring somebody into the wrong expectation.

A candidate might hear “Founding Product Manager” and interpret that as full product ownership. The founder may mean that the new hire will lead much of the product work while the founder remains deeply involved in major product decisions. Both interpretations are reasonable. The problem is failing to discuss the difference.

A16z highlights role scope and growth trajectory as common areas of expectation mismatch in founding-team hiring. If the role is likely to change, say so. If a more senior executive may eventually be hired above the person, discuss it. If 40% of the role today is work they probably will not be doing in two years, explain that too.

Strong startup candidates are rarely frightened by ambiguity. They are far more likely to be frustrated by unexpected ambiguity.

Early hires are taking real risk. Treat the proposition accordingly.

Someone joining as employee number three or seven is making a materially different career decision from somebody joining after Series D. The company may fail. Their equity may ultimately be worth nothing. The role may change significantly. The business may struggle to raise its next round.

That risk is partly why early employee equity exists. Carta's US benchmarks based on more than 9,000 initial equity grants in 2024 found a median grant of around 1.5% for the first employee. Carta's broader first-ten-hire analysis puts roughly 0.5% around employee five and 0.2% around employee ten. These are US benchmarks, not a compensation formula, and UK structures differ, but they illustrate how much the risk/reward profile changes across the earliest hires.

Carta's first-ten-hire equity data is useful context for founders thinking about the proposition they are asking candidates to accept.

Compensation is only part of that proposition. Ownership, learning, impact, mission, access to founders and the opportunity to build something rather than simply operate it can all matter. But founders should be able to answer the question: “Why is this opportunity worth taking the risk?”

Don't hire a collection of impressive individuals. Build a complementary team.

A startup does not need ten versions of its strongest founder. It needs complementary capability.

Before opening another role, map what the existing team is genuinely strong at, then identify what is missing. The gap might be technical depth, commercial instinct, management experience, customer empathy, operating discipline or simply someone capable of taking ownership of a problem that currently returns to the founder every Friday afternoon.

This is why an early hiring plan should be built around gaps and outcomes, not titles.

So who should your first ten hires actually be?

There is no universal sequence. A developer-tools company, vertical AI business, cybersecurity platform and enterprise SaaS company can reach the same funding stage with completely different capability requirements.

Before every early hire, ask four questions:

1. What must the business prove next?
2. What capability is currently stopping us proving it?
3. Do we understand the problem well enough to define the person we need?
4. What evidence would convince us that somebody is exceptional at solving this problem at this stage?

Only then should you write the job description.

Because the goal of your first ten hires is not to complete an organisation chart. It is to increase the number of important problems the company can solve without increasing the number of problems the founders have to personally own.

And when venture-backed teams are becoming smaller, more technology-enabled and more capital-efficient, getting those decisions right matters more, not less.

Sources & further reading

• Carta — State of Startup Compensation: H2 2025
• Andreessen Horowitz — How to Hire a Strong Founding Team
• Y Combinator — I'm a Cofounder of Gusto, Here's the Advice I Give Every Startup Founder
• First Round Review — 23 Tactical Company-Building Lessons Learned from Scaling Stripe and Notion
• Carta — Early startup employee equity benchmarks