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Every early hire helps set the standard for how the team works, communicates, and makes decisions.
Every founder knows hiring matters. Almost none of them treat their first 10 hires like the highest-stakes decisions they’ll make all year—and that’s a mistake.
At 10 people, your company culture is already taking hold, whether you have defined it or not. Every early hire helps set the standard for how the team works, communicates, and makes decisions. “Your first 10 hires are your culture. Not the values page, not the offsite,” says Alex Blackwood, co-founder of Mogul, a fractional real estate investing platform. “Culture is whatever those 10 people do when no one is watching, and everyone you bring on after them calibrates to it. Get the 10 hires wrong and you’ve quietly reset the bar for the next 50.”
That math has held for nearly a decade at CollyString, a Phoenix-based performance marketing agency founded by Anthony Nichols. “Company culture isn’t top-down, it’s bottom-up,” Nichols says. “The people you hire early embody it, build it, and define it.” With a small team, he adds, you can afford to be far more particular—not just about the resume, but about the person. Half his team has stuck around four to five years, which he credits directly to hiring for fit over paper.
That scrutiny cuts both ways. Bithiah Sel, CMO and co-founder of Beluxe Creative, says her first hires nearly broke her. “I was coaching so much I nearly ended up doing their jobs on top of my own,” she says. “Coaching a new hire is fine and expected. Doing their work for them is not. The moment you are doing their job on top of yours, you are leaking time and money, the company stops growing, and it is the wrong hire.”
Where founders get it wrong
Founders often make the same hiring mistakes again and again. They chase a résumé instead of a person. They hire out of panic instead of strategy. They mistake credentials for conviction.
Pedigree-chasing gets zero patience from Lindsey Chrismon, co-founder and CEO of Oply and the first woman in U.S. Army history to fly the AH-6M Little Bird in special operations. “Someone who spent a whole career inside big companies was trained to wait for headcount, budget, and certainty,” Chrismon says. “A startup is the opposite: you make autonomous, data-driven calls with limited information and limited resources. I’ll take scrappy and level-headed over pedigreed every time.”
The same short-term thinking appears when founders hire simply because they’re drowning, says Jay Aldebert, chief growth officer at the business strategy and consulting firm International Services Inc. “They look for someone to take work off their plate instead of asking whether this role will improve the business over the long term,” he says. “Every early hire should either generate revenue, improve operational efficiency, or give the founder more visibility into the business. If they don’t, you’re adding payroll without adding value.”
Ironically, the opposite instinct — waiting for the “perfect” candidate — causes its own damage too. “Overthinking those first few hires because you want the absolute best is exactly how you end up with the wrong person,” Sel says. Her fix: write down your non-negotiables and put them in the job posting itself. “A vague job post pulls in vague candidates.”
What velocity actually means
The right hires reduce the number of decisions that need to pass through the founder, giving the team more room to act and the company more speed.
It helps to think of it as an operating-system choice, according to Sahin Boydas, founder and CEO of agentic AI company Lovie.co and a four-time founder who sold his last company to Gusto. “When you hire your first 10 people, you are hard-coding the company’s operating system,” he says. “If your first 10 hires expect to be managed, you will build a company requiring constant oversight. But if your first 10 hires are high-agency individuals who take radical ownership of their time and outcomes, you build a culture of leverage.”
An aviation metaphor captures the same idea for Nichols, who borrows the term V1—the moment a pilot is committed and taking off. “With the right people, you reach V1 a lot quicker, because you’re not managing the personnel side, you’re focused on the actual work,” he says. He’s just as disciplined about cutting losses: most bad fits reveal themselves within four to six weeks, and moving fast on that keeps the core team healthy.
The downside, as Sel puts it bluntly: “The wrong hire quietly turns you into both the bottleneck and the backup plan, and every decision routes through you.” A small company’s only real edge over bigger competitors is speed — and one wrong hire is enough to erase it.
The hire that’s hardest to undo
The most dangerous bad hire, according to Blackwood, isn’t the obvious underperformer. “It’s the wrong person in the right seat: they hit every number, so on paper they’re a star, but they trample the values getting there and the whole team feels it,” he says. The spreadsheet is begging you to keep them, but you probably shouldn’t.
The whole exercise is like pouring a foundation, Nichols says. “A poor foundation won’t fail in a month, but down the road you’ll see the cracks in your finished work. Your first handful of hires is the concrete and the footing.” Aldebert agrees that discipline, not speed, is what compounds: “The businesses that scale the best aren’t always the ones that hire the fastest. They’re the ones that make disciplined hiring decisions and build a team with clear roles, measurable accountability, and a shared commitment to the company’s goals.”
Get the first 10 right, and—as nearly every founder here put it, in one form or another—the company starts to run itself. Get them wrong, and you’ll spend your second year fighting a culture you built by accident.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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