Your First Ten Hires Will Shape the Next Hundred

I've spent much of my career helping technology companies build engineering teams, from established businesses to startups hiring their first handful of employees.

Earlier in my career in London, I helped build the founding teams at Tide and Yapily. At Yapily, I recruited their first developer, employee number three, when the business was just getting started.

Today, I'm working with founders building at the forefront of AI, many of whom are facing similar decisions about the first people they bring into their businesses.

When you're hiring employee number three, you're making a very different decision from hiring employee number fifty. There's often no established engineering function, no mature processes and very little room for someone who needs everything clearly defined before they can get started. You're looking for people who can help establish those things, while also doing the work needed to get the business off the ground.

What I've come to appreciate, particularly having watched some of those early businesses grow, is just how much influence those first few people can have on everything that follows.

Your early hires set the standard

When you're building a team from scratch, every hire has an influence that goes well beyond their individual contribution. They're helping establish how the business operates, how decisions get made, how problems are solved and ultimately what good looks like.

But there's another part of this that I think is often overlooked. The quality of your first hires has a direct influence on the quality of the people you'll be able to attract next.

Good engineers want to work with other good engineers. They want to be challenged, learn from the people around them and feel confident that they're joining a team capable of building something worthwhile.

When you're an unknown startup competing against established businesses with bigger salaries, stronger brands and more security, the people already in your team can be one of your biggest selling points.

I've seen how much weight candidates put on who they'll actually be working alongside. Particularly at the senior end, conversations often move beyond the product and compensation to the technical capability of the team, the decisions being made and whether the people involved are someone they can learn from.

The reverse is also true. If you compromise too much on those early hires, you can make it harder to attract the next ones. Not necessarily because those people are poor performers, but because the standards, expectations and technical decisions being established now will influence what comes later.

It's why I think founders should look at those first few hires as more than filling an immediate gap. They're also helping build the reputation of a business that doesn't yet have much of one.

Hire for the business you are today

One of the challenges with early-stage hiring is that the person who looks strongest on paper isn't necessarily the person who's going to be most effective in your business.

Someone might have spent years working at a globally recognised technology company, building sophisticated systems with large teams and established infrastructure around them. They might be an exceptional engineer, but that doesn't automatically mean they'll enjoy or succeed in an environment where none of those things exist.

Equally, someone from a company you've never heard of might have spent the last few years building products from scratch, working directly with customers, making architectural decisions and dealing with whatever problems came their way.

Their CV might not look as impressive, but their experience could be far more relevant to what you're trying to achieve.

This is something I find myself discussing with founders regularly. It's easy to start with a list of companies you'd love to hire from, but I think it's far more useful to understand what someone has actually been responsible for and the environment in which they've done it.

That doesn't mean experience at a larger business isn't valuable. Of course it is. It's about understanding whether that experience translates to the problems you're facing.

For a founding engineer, you might need someone who can build the initial product, make sensible technical decisions, speak directly with customers and take ownership of getting something into production. That's a very different proposition from joining an established engineering team with a clearly defined role.

And while you should absolutely be thinking about where the business is going, there's a danger in hiring too far ahead of where you actually are.

The people who get you to ten might not get you to fifty

One of the things founders have to accept is that the capabilities a business needs will change as it grows.

I saw this with Tide, where I'd been involved in building out the early team in London. As the company developed, it brought in new executive leadership, including a CEO and CTO, to help take the business through its next stage of growth.

I wasn't involved in those particular appointments, but having worked with the business in its earlier stages, it was interesting to see how the requirements changed as the company grew.

The person who can take an idea and turn it into a working product isn't necessarily the person best equipped to build and lead an engineering organisation of a hundred people.

Those are different challenges, and neither is inherently more valuable than the other.

Some early employees will grow with the business and take on increasingly senior responsibilities. Others will remain exceptional individual contributors, and sometimes the company will need to bring in people with experience of problems it hasn't faced before.

I don't think that means the original hires were wrong. In many cases, those people were exactly what the business needed at the time.

The important thing is recognising when the requirements have changed, rather than assuming that the same people, structures and ways of working will continue to be effective indefinitely.

There's also a balance to be struck. You don't want to build an organisation around people who can only solve today's problems, but equally, hiring someone who's brilliant at managing a hundred-person team when you've only got four engineers might not be the best use of your resources.

What changes when AI enters the picture?

I'm seeing a similar set of questions emerging with the AI companies I'm working with today, although the capabilities they're looking for are evolving.

AI-assisted development means small teams can potentially build and deliver far more than they could previously. It's changing how founders think about the size and composition of their engineering teams, and increasingly, what they expect from individual engineers.

There's a lot of discussion about whether AI will mean companies need fewer developers. I think the more interesting question is what those developers will actually be responsible for.

If building software becomes faster, then understanding what needs to be built, why it matters and how to make it work in the real world becomes even more important.

We're seeing demand for engineers who can move comfortably between technical execution, product thinking and customer conversations. People who don't necessarily need a detailed specification before they can start making progress, but who can understand a problem, work out an approach and take responsibility for delivering it.

In many ways, those are qualities that have always been valuable in founding teams. What's changing is how much an individual with those capabilities can potentially achieve.

Of course, there's still a huge need for deep technical specialists, particularly in areas like AI infrastructure, research and complex systems. But for many early-stage businesses, the ability to take ownership across traditional boundaries is becoming increasingly valuable.

And that brings us back to the importance of those first few hires. If a small team can now accomplish what previously required a much larger one, the decisions about who makes up that team become even more significant.

Think beyond the job description

When I'm speaking with founders about their first hires, I think one of the most useful things we can do is move away from the job description for a moment and understand what they're actually trying to achieve.

What is the business struggling to do today? Where are the founders spending time that they shouldn't need to? What would change if they had someone who could take complete ownership of a particular problem?

Once you understand that, you can start thinking about the type of person who might be able to solve it, rather than starting with a list of technical requirements, years of experience and preferred employers.

And just as importantly, think about what that person will bring to the team beyond their own work. Will they raise the technical standard? Challenge the way things are being done? Help the people around them improve? Make it easier to attract the next great hire?

Having been involved in building teams at different stages, and then watching some of those businesses develop over the years, it's something I've come to appreciate more and more.

Your first ten hires won't all be perfect, and the people you need will inevitably change as the business grows. But the influence those early employees have on the culture, capability and reputation of the company can last long after you've moved beyond the founding stage.

You're not just hiring the people who will build your first product. You're helping establish the standard for everyone who comes after them.