You end up saying no to 90% of the stuff.
The instinct runs the wrong way
Ask a founder how the first engineering hires should go and the reasoning sounds prudent. Money is short and senior people are expensive. There is no team yet, so there is nothing for a senior leader to lead. The product will change completely three times before it matters, so what the company needs is hungry, inexpensive generalists — and seniority can be layered in later, once there is something to manage and revenue to pay for it.
Every premise in that paragraph is understandable, and the conclusion is backwards. It imports the logic of a large company, where a junior hire is diluted into safety: a manager reviews their work, process catches what people miss, and a weak quarter from one seat is a rounding error in a department of two hundred. A four-person company has none of that. There is no layer to absorb a junior hire's mistakes, no bench, no manager to catch the work before a customer does. Each person is a quarter of the company. The first hires are not diluted into the organization; they are the organization — its technical standard, its working culture, and the interview panel every later hire will face.
Get the full paper
The complete paper — the rest of the argument, the working detail, and the record — as a PDF.
Hiring for a role like the ones in this paper?
Start with the question we open every search with: if we're successful a year from now, what are we talking about that really worked out well — with the candidate we place?