TLDR
• Hiring is the most under-rated founder super power. It's a skill, not luck — and almost nobody trains it.
• Hire almost too late, until your product earns the next hire.
• Every hire has to move "product lovability" or "distribution velocity." Anything else is decoration.
• The 4 mistakes that kill early teams: hiring out of fear, hiring out of habit, hiring junior, and waiting for the unicorn.
• Build the muscle: write the JD yourself, run the first five calls yourself, and steal people you've already worked with.
Most founders treat hiring like dental work or coffee break job. Necessary, painful, or fearful, postponed. Don't be that guy/gal.
The ones who build durable companies treat it like the actual job — the highest-leverage thing they do all month. The difference shows up later, when the product they shipped is good, and good is simply not enough these days. The team they assembled is mediocre. Not "Navy Seals" as Elon calls the exceptional hires, and by then it's too expensive to fix.
Hiring is a super power. And like any super power, it's built — not granted.
Your goal as CEO is to build a team that runs your entire company better than you.
"First ten hires set the ceiling for the next hundred. Get them wrong and you're building on sand." — Ross Starkey
That's the whole game in two sentences.
Why founders dodge it
Founders dodge hiring for two reasons.
One, nobody taught them how. They learned to code, and sometimes to pitch — they didn't learn how to spot, attract, and close a great talent — whether for sales or an operator.
Two, hiring confronts them with their own gaps, and sometimes ego gets in the way. Every JD is a public confession of what you can't do alone. That's uncomfortable, so most people skip the confession and write a generic "looking for a marketer" post on X or LinkedIn.
I'm gonna be blunt: if you can't articulate exactly what "outcomes" your next hire will own, what bar they have to clear, and what would make you fire them in 90 days — you're not ready to hire them. You're ready to feel less anxious about hiring them.
Big difference.
Hire almost too late
Until your product reaches PMF, you should stay as small as humanly possible. The pressure to "build a team" usually comes from outside — investors who confuse headcount with progress, or your own anxiety dressing itself up as ambition.
A hire is only worth it if it moves one of the two needles I keep coming back to:
Product lovability — the thing customers actually want, more clearly delivered.
Distribution velocity — the rate at which the right people learn about it and want it.
If a candidate doesn't move one of those, they're decoration. And decoration that is expensive for any size of the team.
"If you're starting a business today, you don't need to hire a team on day one. It's the biggest change in the Startup playbook in decades." — Sergio Pereira
You should hire when the shift from "vibe coding" to "software engineering" happens. But then you need to hire hard! And you should already know whom you will want to hire -- most likely someone you've worked with before.
See, the tools changed. The math on early hiring changed with them. AI lets a single founder ship what used to take five people — use that runway to find the right people, not just people.
The 4 mistakes that kill early teams
After watching this play out across dozens of startups, the same four mistakes show up almost every time:
1. Hiring out of fear. The business isn't going where you hoped, and someone's whispering "you need a head of growth."
Spoiler: you need different positioning, not a head of growth. If you don't naturally feel the need, don't hire. Anxiety is a terrible recruiter.
2. Hiring out of habit. Corporate background creeping in. "We need a process for this, so we need someone to manage that process."
Wrong. If you, as the founder, can't keep a 5-person team aligned around a lovable product, no process and no hire will fix it.
3. Hiring junior, or project managers. Stop. Unless it's a temp intern for your X campaign.
Also, "junior" implies a senior to learn from — which you don't have. Hire for potential at full trust, not at junior titles. Either bet on someone, or don't. And, there's nothing a project manager can do in a 12-person startup that a founder can't do in 20 minutes a day.
4. Waiting for the unicorn. The "ideal hire" is mostly a coping mechanism for not deciding. Real hires are 70% of what you wanted with one absolutely non-negotiable strength. Hire that, support them, and let the other 30% emerge.
Build the muscle
Here's the part most founder content skips: hiring is learnable. It's a sequence of habits, not a personality trait. The founders who become great hirers all do roughly the same things:
Write the JD yourself. Don't outsource it to a recruiter. The act of writing it forces you to specify what you're missing. Consult with recruiter friends when done, sure.
Take the first calls yourself. No exceptions. Nobody screens for fit better than the founder.
Maintain a private list. People you've worked with, people you'd hire when the day comes. Nurture it for years, not weeks.
Steal smart. Your strongest hires are almost always people you've already shipped something with. The risk of those hires is a tenth of a cold hire.
"The shortcut to early recruiting is hiring people you've already worked with. You don't have to guess what they're like under pressure. You already know." — Scott Case, via @calbucci
Exactly this. The most successful early teams I've seen weren't assembled from LinkedIn — they were assembled from someone's old contact list.
The two roles that beat "process" every time
If you're building hardware, software, Web3, or anything in between, the early team that takes you from "founders + engineers" to "ready for scale" is almost always the same two people:
A business-focused CBO who can run BD, partnerships, and the customer side without supervision.
A marketing generalist who has shipped in your domain before — they don't need playbooks, they are the playbook.
Skip the project managers and the junior-everything. Hire those two right, and you'll do more in six months than 20 engineers and a recruiter will do in two years.
Last word
If you take one thing: hiring is not the founder's chore. It's the founder's leverage — and one of the five core roles only you can own. Build it like you'd build any other muscle — deliberately, painfully, on purpose.
Hire almost too late.
Hire for what moves the needle.
And steal the people you'd already trust.
Till next time, let's BUILD BETTER!
Pete (aka BFG)
ICYMI: Don't Use Agencies — Build Your Own Muscles — the companion piece on why agencies don't fix what hiring should.