Operations
Your First 10 Hires Determine Everything
Culture isn't values painted on a wall. It's the average behavior of the first ten people you hire, compounded daily for the next decade. Get the first ten right and you build a flywheel. Get them wrong and you'll spend years undoing the damage — usually after a painful, expensive replatform of your team.
Founders chase resumes. Operators recruit for slope, not intercept. The question isn't 'what has this person done?' It's 'how fast did they grow doing it, and what did they learn that I can't teach?'
Hire generalists who run toward ambiguity. Avoid specialists who need a runway. Pay above market in equity, below market in salary. The right people self-select into that trade.
And fire faster than feels comfortable. The single most expensive mistake in a startup's first year isn't a bad product launch — it's a B-player on a 10-person team setting the ceiling for everyone else.
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