Hiring and early teams

Early hiring is the highest-leverage and highest-risk activity after finding product-market fit (and sometimes before). One great first engineer can 3× shipping speed. One bad hire can stall the team for a quarter and poison culture. Founders who treat hiring as something HR will "set up later" quietly lose to founders who treat it like fundraising: a full-time craft of sourcing, selling and closing.

This is the company side — who to hire, what to pay, how equity works at early stages, and how culture becomes a filter. For the employee view of offers and dilution, see employee equity and option pools.

Concepts in this section

Read them in order.

Step	Concept	What it answers
1	First hires	Generalist or specialist, and when?
2	Founder recruiting	How do you source, screen and close at seed?
3	Early compensation and equity	What do bands and grants look like?
4	Firing and onboarding	How do you convert a grant into velocity — and exit a miss?

Index Ventures' US seed averages put a senior engineer around ~1.0% fully diluted, mid around ~0.45%. YC's spirit is similar: be generous early, on the order of ~10% of the company for the first ~10 employees, with standard four-year vesting and a one-year cliff. First engineers often land 0.5–1.5%. Cash figures in old blog posts go stale; use current OptionPlan, Carta or investor surveys. A $40–80k cash discount vs big-tech only works if the grant is real and the company might become valuable — model dilution, not the no-dilution fantasy.

If you are an early employee: ask for fully diluted %, option count, strike, vesting and pool size, and model dilution. If you are becoming a hiring manager: protect the bar, write the 90-day plan before the offer, and spend founder-quality time on closing. Interview angle: "How would you hire the first engineer for X?" Strong answers cover sourcing, bar, compensation shape and what "good in 90 days" means — not just interview-process theater.

Common mistakes

Specialists before the machine works, or a VP of Sales before you can describe who buys.
Ad-hoc offers that create 2× equity inequity for the same work.
Selling no-dilution exit math.
Six-month PIPs on eight months of runway.
Day-30 still waiting on credentials — a founder failure, not an employee one.

Key takeaways

Hire generalists for bottlenecks; specialists after the machine works.
Founders own recruiting early: source outbound, move fast, sell the real job.
Equity is the upside. Use order-of-magnitude bands (Index / YC) and standard 4-year vest with cliff.
Write levels and bands early to prevent inequity.
Culture is enforced behavior. Performance problems need fast feedback and decisive exits.