Hiring is the highest-leverage thing a founder does in the first two years. Get the first ten right and the company compounds; get them wrong and you spend the next year unwinding mistakes. Here's the pattern we see across our best-performing portfolio companies.

Hire builders before managers

The most common mistake is hiring a VP of Engineering or Head of Sales before there's anything to manage. At pre-seed and seed, you want senior individual contributors who ship — not coordinators. Management structure should follow scale, never precede it.

The forward-deployed engineer

For AI startups specifically, an early forward-deployed engineer — someone who sits with customers, wires up integrations, and turns messy real-world data into product feedback — is worth three pure backend hires. They close the loop between what you built and what customers actually need.

Hire slow on roles you can't yet define

If you can't write a one-paragraph description of what success looks like in 90 days, you're not ready to hire that role. Founders who wait until the need is undeniable consistently outperform those who hire against a hypothetical org chart.