Why does The First Ten Hires matter?
The bar for these hires is different from the bar for hire fifty, and treating them the same way produces bad outcomes in both directions. At this size there is no onboarding program, no manager layer, and often no clear job description — each person has to figure out what needs doing and do it without much guidance, which rewards generalists who take ownership over specialists who wait for direction. It also means each hire disproportionately shapes the culture everyone who joins after inherits, so a bad first-ten hire costs more than a bad hire number thirty.
What does The First Ten Hires look like in practice?
Suppose a company hires its first customer success person specifically to run a defined support queue — a reasonable hire at fifty employees, where the role is scoped and supported. At employee number four, the same title with the same scope is a mismatch: there is no queue yet, no playbook, and the actual job is closer to inventing the function from scratch, including deciding what "customer success" should even mean for this product. Hiring for the title rather than for the ambiguity is how early hires end up underused or set up to fail.
What are the common mistakes with The First Ten Hires?
- Hiring for a title and job description copied from a larger company rather than for the ambiguity of an undefined early role.
- Optimizing for pedigree over demonstrated ability to operate without process.
- Under-weighting culture fit because the team is in a hurry to fill a gap, then absorbing the cost for years afterward.
- Waiting too long to make the first hire because the founder believes no one else can do the work as well — usually true, and beside the point.
Related concepts
- Co-Founder Equity SplitHow ownership of the company is divided among the founding team at the outset — a decision made with the least information a company will ever have about who contributes what.
- Founder-Market FitThe match between a founding team's specific unfair advantage — domain expertise, lived experience of the problem, or an unusual network — and the market they are building for.
- Advisor Equity GrantsA small equity grant given to an advisor in exchange for ongoing, informal guidance — sized far below a co-founder or employee grant and vested over a shorter schedule.