Your first ten hires

A hire is not a monthly salary. It is salary plus payroll taxes plus benefits plus equipment plus software plus the recruiting cost of finding them, and it is a commitment that is painful and slow to reverse. The practical loaded cost is commonly twenty-five to forty percent above base salary.

The discipline that helps is to compute the runway impact before opening the role, not after the offer is accepted. A company with fourteen months of runway that adds three people at a hundred and thirty thousand loaded is a company with roughly ten months of runway, and that changes when the next fundraise must start.

The order below fits most business software companies with technical founders. The principle underneath it generalises: hire against the constraint that is actually binding, and resist hiring a function because companies are supposed to have one.

A head of sales before the founders have closed deals themselves is the most expensive early mistake. Nobody can build a sales process for a product whose value proposition has not been proven in a room by the people who built it. The senior hire arrives, finds no process to scale, and leaves after nine months having burned a large salary and a year of momentum.

Similar pattern with senior marketing leaders before there is a repeatable motion to amplify, and with managers hired to manage teams that do not exist yet. Early-stage companies need people who do the work, not people who direct it.

Early-stage companies generally pay below large-company cash rates and compensate with equity. The honest framing to a candidate is that the equity is probably worth nothing and might be worth a great deal, and that the cash discount is real. Candidates who need certainty should not join, and telling them so is kinder than the alternative.

Typical ranges: the first engineering hires might receive half a percent to two percent, hires five through ten commonly a quarter to one percent, with four-year vesting and a one-year cliff throughout. The precise numbers vary by market and stage, but the shape — sharply declining grants as risk falls — is consistent.

Ten interviews and a panel is inappropriate at this stage and loses good candidates to faster companies. What works is a short structured process built around real work: a conversation about their experience, a paid or time-boxed exercise resembling the actual job, and a reference call with someone who managed them.

The work sample is the part founders most often skip and most often regret skipping. Interviews measure how well someone interviews. A half-day of the real work measures the thing you are buying.

Hiring to fix a problem the founders have not diagnosed is the recurring one. Adding a salesperson does not fix a product nobody retains; it adds cost and delays the discovery of the real issue by two quarters.

The second is tolerating a bad early hire. At ten people, one person who is wrong for the role affects everything, and the delay in acting is invariably the part founders regret rather than the decision itself.

In Garage to IPO, hiring adds capacity and fixed payroll simultaneously, and morale falls when teams are stretched or under-compensated relative to the work. Equity grants offset that at the cost of your own ownership, which is the real trade.

The pattern that beats most runs is the one this guide describes: hire slightly behind the growth rather than ahead of it, and treat every role as a decision about runway as much as capability.