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The early team can make or break a startup, yet most founders approach hiring with deeply flawed assumptions.
After spending years working closely with early-stage companies, I’ve seen how the strongest teams come together and where most founders go wrong. The difference often lies in understanding a few key principles that contradict conventional wisdom.
Past success can be misleading
Many founders believe they need to hire from successful tech companies and seek candidates with impressive track records. This seems logical but often backfires. Early-stage startups operate in uncertainty, with limited resources and unclear direction. Success at a large company doesn’t predict success in this environment. In fact, it can be a liability.
The skills that make someone successful at a large tech company — managing established processes, working with complex organizational structures and optimizing existing systems — are often at odds with what startups need. Early-stage companies require people who can create structure from chaos, build systems from scratch and make decisions with limited information.
Moreover, candidates from big tech companies often struggle with the lack of support systems in startups. There are no large teams to delegate to, no established processes to follow and no safety nets. The ability to operate without these support structures is crucial, yet it’s rarely developed in larger organizations.
Founders also tend to overvalue industry experience, particularly in their market. However, in the early stages, the ability to learn quickly and adapt to change matters far more than deep industry knowledge. The market you think you’re entering often isn’t the one where you’ll find success.
Related: Mistakes First-Time Founders Make
Early hires create culture
Most founders understand culture matters, but few realize how deeply early hires shape it. Your first ten employees don’t just do the work — they define how decisions get made, how people communicate and how the team handles pressure. These patterns become deeply embedded and extremely difficult to change later.
Technical skills can be taught, but values and working styles are much harder to shift. Smart founders spend as much time assessing how candidates approach problems and interact with others as they do evaluating their technical abilities. They understand that these early hires will become the benchmark against which future candidates are measured.
As my company, Evernomic, scales to an internal team of nearly 50 people, we’ve still maintained an average age of under 25. I opt for younger individuals who, despite lacking decades of industry experience, have their core values aligned with mine. Competence can be acquired, but the character they bring to the table is far harder to replicate. I aspire to a team I can trust not only in a board meeting but also with the keys to my house.
The cultural impact of early hires extends beyond their immediate team. They become the company’s first managers, which sets the tone for how leadership operates. They influence how the company deals with conflict, how it celebrates success and how it handles failure. Their behaviors and attitudes become the unwritten rules of company culture.
Specialists often struggle
Early-stage startups need people who can adapt as the company’s needs change. Hiring too many specialists too early is a common mistake. While every startup needs some specialized expertise, the first team members should be comfortable stepping outside their defined roles.
Most successful early-stage companies build teams of adaptable people who combine deep expertise in one area with the ability and willingness to help wherever needed. This flexibility proves invaluable as priorities shift and new challenges emerge. The best early employees often end up in roles very different from the ones they were hired for.
The danger of specialists isn’t just their narrow focus — it’s that they often resist taking on work outside their specialty. Early-stage startups need people who see their role as “whatever needs to be done” rather than a specific function.
Taking ownership
The strongest early employees think and act like founders, not employees. They spot problems and fix them without being told. They lose sleep over challenges and celebrate wins as their own. This mindset is rare and doesn’t always correlate with experience or previous employers.
True ownership means being willing to do unglamorous work while keeping sight of the bigger picture. It means taking responsibility not just for completing tasks but for achieving outcomes. Most importantly, it means caring deeply about the company’s success beyond one’s immediate responsibilities.
This quality is particularly crucial because early-stage startups lack the management bandwidth to supervise every activity closely. They need people who can operate autonomously while staying aligned with company goals.
Looking beyond the usual suspects
Building a team that thinks and experiences the world in similar ways is a recipe for blind spots. The strongest early teams combine different perspectives, backgrounds and ways of thinking. This helps companies avoid the echo chambers that can lead to costly mistakes.
Having different educational backgrounds, career paths and life experiences all contribute to a team’s ability to see opportunities and challenges from multiple angles.
Duolingo’s early success demonstrates this perfectly. Rather than staffing their team solely with experienced EdTech professionals, they deliberately built a team that included linguists, gaming designers and data scientists from various cultural backgrounds. Their varied perspectives led to the gamified approach that has now helped millions learn new languages. This wasn’t just about having different skills — it was about bringing together people who thought about education, motivation and learning in fundamentally different ways.
Your early team shapes everything that follows. The way your early team works becomes your company’s default operating system. Their approaches to problem-solving become your company’s standard practices. Their values become your company’s culture. This is why rushing these early hires out of desperation or convenience can have such devastating long-term consequences and vice versa.
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