Hiring Your First Ten People
The first ten hires don't just do work — they decide what good looks like for everyone who comes after.
Your first hires set the ceiling
The first ten people don't just do work — they decide what good looks like for everyone who comes after them. Hire one person who cuts corners and you have quietly licensed corner-cutting for the whole company.
Replace gut feel with a scorecard
We stopped asking "did we like them" and started scoring candidates against the outcomes the role had to deliver in its first ninety days.
- Mission: what this role must achieve in the first quarter
- Outcomes: 3 measurable results, ranked by importance
- Competencies: the 4 behaviors the work actually requires
- Score each 1-5, and decide before you compare notesWriting the scorecard before the interview killed most of our bias. We were grading against the job, not against how much the candidate happened to remind us of ourselves.
Sell as hard as you screen
Great early people always have other options. We treated every final-stage candidate like a customer we were closing — real founder time, a clear story about the mission, and a fast, unambiguous yes.
Written by the founder
Notes from the day-to-day of building a company. Replace this bio with your own — a line about what you're building and what you've learned goes a long way with readers.