Hiring the First Ten: A Founder''s Guide to the Employees Who Decide Whether the Company Reaches Series A
The first ten hires shape the next hundred. They set the pace, define the interview loop, and, more than any other single factor, determine whether the company reaches a real Series A. Hire well and every subsequent decision is easier. Hire badly and you spend the next twelve months managing around the wrong people.
There is no single right order, but there is a wrong order. The wrong order is hiring the leadership team before the individual contributors.
For a typical seed-stage B2B SaaS company that has just raised $2–4M:
1. Founding engineer (IC). Not a "VP." A senior IC who will ship code alongside the technical co-founder. 2. Second founding engineer. Same profile. Different strength (frontend if the first was backend, or infra if the first was product). 3. Founding designer. Product design, brand design, UX writing — all in one person. This role is criminally under-hired at seed. 4. First AE or first customer success. Depends on the sales motion. If founder-led sales is working, hire a CS person to hold the accounts. If it is not, hire an AE who has sold at this stage before. 5. Third and fourth engineers. By now the founding engineers have opinions on who they want. Trust them. 6. First product manager. Once there are 4+ engineers and the co-founder can no longer be the sole voice on prioritization. 7. Growth or marketing generalist. A single person who owns content, SEO, top-of-funnel experiments, and the website. Not a VP Marketing. 8. Second AE. If the first one hit quota. If they did not, replace them. 9. First finance / ops person. Bookkeeping, billing, HR, contracts. Often a fractional CFO plus a part-time bookkeeper is enough here. 10. Fifth engineer or a second product person. Wherever the bottleneck is.
Notice what is not on the list: VP Sales, VP Marketing, VP Engineering, Chief of Staff. None of them belong in the first ten. Every one of them belongs in hires 15–30 once the company has real product-market fit and specific bottlenecks that a functional leader can solve.
Rough US bands, early 2026, for well-funded seed companies. Adjust for market and cost of living.
Founding engineer: $140–180K base + 0.5–1.5% equity (4-year vest, 1-year cliff).
Senior engineer (hires 3–5): $150–190K base + 0.15–0.5% equity.
1. All grants vest over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. No exceptions. 2. Refresh at 3 years, not at 4. A retention grant in year 3, sized to a fresh 4-year vest, keeps the strongest early employees. 3. Do not skimp on the first five. They are taking career risk to join. The equity is the reason. A 0.5% grant vs. 1% is invisible to the burn but decides whether the person says yes.
The interview loop for the first ten is different from the loop for hires 20–100. Optimize for taste, ownership, and range, not process fit.
Not a technical screen. A conversation. Two questions to answer: does this person light up when they talk about what they do, and can they explain their work to a non-expert.
A real problem the company has, scoped down. For engineers, a small feature or a bug hunt. For designers, redesign one flow. For AEs, a mock discovery call. Pay for the time. Everyone treats it more seriously.
Work on something together with two future teammates. Not a test — a real block of work. This is where taste and ownership become visible.
Not the references they gave you. People they worked with, that you found via LinkedIn or your network. Ask three questions:
Would you hire them again for a 10-person startup? (This last one is the whole call.)
The trait that matters most in the first ten is agency. The employee who, when they see a problem, does not ask "should I work on this?" but starts working on it and tells you what they did afterwards.
They ask what the biggest current problem is and pivot the conversation to it.
They have side projects, essays, or open-source work that is theirs, not their employer's.
The trait that matters least is years of experience. A two-year-out engineer with agency will outperform a ten-year IC without it.
1. Hiring the VP first. A VP without a team to lead becomes an expensive individual contributor who is unhappy about it. Hire the team, then the leader. 2. Hiring friends because they are available. The bar has to be higher for people you know personally, not lower. Firing a friend is worse than not hiring them. 3. Under-grant then over-refresh. Better to grant the right amount upfront than to have the "why is my equity so low" conversation in month 8. 4. Skipping the work sample. Every hire that skipped the paid work sample was a hire that got walked out within 90 days. Every one. 5. Hiring in a rush after a raise. The 30 days after a round closes is the worst time to hire. You are cash-rich and judgment-poor. Slow down.
Once a month, in a private document, rank all your employees on two axes: would you hire them again today? and are they in the right role?
If the answer to the first question is no for anyone, act within 30 days. If the answer to the second is no, move them or offer them an exit within 60 days.
The first ten are the operating system of the company. Debugging it late is expensive. Debugging it fast is the whole job.
