Most early-stage founders assume hiring is a skills problem. Find someone with the right experience, pay them fairly, done.
YC founders learn quickly that it’s not. The first 10 hires make or break a company, not because of their resumes, but because of something much harder to screen for.
Here’s what actually matters.
1. They Don’t Need Managing
At 10 people, there’s no manager layer, no onboarding, no process. Founders are still closing deals, fixing bugs, and doing finance simultaneously. The first hires have to take a vague directive “figure out why churn went up” and come back three days later with a root cause and a fix. No check-ins required.
Candidates from large companies often struggle here. Not because they’re not smart, they’re trained to wait for clarity that doesn’t exist yet.
What to look for: Side projects that shipped. Roles where they built something from zero. Anything that proves they move without being pushed.
2. They Believe in the Problem, Not the Paycheck
Early hires who are there for the equity or the title leave when things get hard. And things always get hard.
The ones who stay are genuinely bothered by the problem you’re solving, before they ever heard of your company. Test for this in interviews: ask candidates why the problem matters, not the product. If the answer sounds like your own landing page, pass.
3. They’re Comfortable Being the Least Technical Person in the Room
Even for non-technical roles.
A first sales hire at a SaaS company needs to read a product spec, understand what the API does, and explain it to a non-technical buyer, without the founder in the room. A biotech ops hire needs to pull a cohort, spot what’s statistically off, and push back on the science team.
The bar isn’t “can you code.” It’s “do you shut down when things get technical, or do you lean in?”
4. They Have Strong Opinions About What Good Looks Like
Early-stage companies are taste machines. The product, the copy, the onboarding, all of it reflects the aesthetic judgment of the first 10 people. If those people don’t have sharp opinions about quality, the product ends up mediocre in ways that are painful to fix later.
Ask candidates what your company’s weakest product decision is. The ones with taste will have an answer.
5. They’re Hired for the Next 18 Months, Not Forever
Don’t hire your Series B head of engineering when you’re pre-seed. Hire the generalist who can build the MVP and survive the chaos of finding product-market fit.
The skills that get a company from 0 to 1 are different from the skills that take it from 1 to 10. Be honest about what the next 18 months actually look like, the ambiguity, the pivots, the things that will definitely change. The right hire for this phase will lean in.
The One Thing That Ties All of This Together
Ownership. Every quality above is a form of it.
Ownership of work. Of problems that aren’t technically theirs. Of the outcome, not just the output. It’s the rarest thing in hiring, it can’t be faked, and it shows up in how someone talks about every job they’ve ever had.
Get this right in the first 10, and the company seems to run itself. Get it wrong, and you spend the next two years wondering why nothing moves.
Finding people like this, at the right stage, in the right market, before your competitors do, is exactly what Hireeazy does.
We connect early-stage and growth-stage companies across Tech, SaaS, Biotech, Sales, and Semiconductor with companies who know what the first 10 hires actually need to look like. No resume stacks. Just the right people, fast.
Hireeazy is a B2B recruiting agency for high-growth teams.