How to build a strong team: the 3 filters behind every great early-stage hire

Since we publicly launched Seapoint and announced our seed round, my inbox has been full of recruiters. I get it. But hiring is something I’ve kept close for a reason. At this stage, who you bring in defines everything - culture, pace, standards. That’s not something I’m ready to delegate.

Many founders hire too fast and filter too loosely. I understand why. When you’re underwater, the temptation is to just get someone in the door. Anybody feels better than nobody. But a bad hire at an early-stage startup doesn’t just slow you down. It can set you back six months. And at pre-seed or seed, you don’t have six months to waste.

Here are the three filters I use for every hire. I developed them from watching Stripe hire at scale, from my own failures as a first-time leader, and from building Seapoint from scratch. They’re not complicated, but at this stage, they’re non-negotiable.

Filter 1: Intellectual horsepower

When I joined Stripe, my boss sat me down and explained the bar. The first thing he said was that intellectual horsepower is a prerequisite. You can teach someone about payments. You can teach someone product management. You cannot teach raw intellectual horsepower.

And I don’t mean IQ. I mean a deep, restless curiosity to learn. Who picks things up fast? Who asks good questions? Who, when they don’t know something, goes and figures it out without being asked?

You can spot it quickly. If someone has been working for five or ten years and hasn’t built up a trail of interesting things they’ve learned, read, experimented with - that tells me something. Intellectual curiosity compounds. The people who have it will have evidence of it everywhere.

Filter 2: At least one outlier achievement

By the time someone is 25-30, there should be something in their life where they had an outlier outcome. I want to emphasise, this doesn’t have to be related to work. It could be sport, music, academic, or literally anything. But there needs to be something where they pushed themselves to a 1% result.

This isn’t about prestige. It’s about drive. Average effort at an early-stage startup just isn’t enough; you’re asking people to do more with less, in more ambiguity, with higher stakes than most jobs.

In my experience, you’ll find at least one ultramarathon runner at any great startup. The domain doesn’t matter. What matters is that at some point, this person decided to be exceptional at something. That drive doesn’t exist in a silo.

I’ve passed on candidates who were great people, worked at decent companies, and had solid track records. But there was nothing in their story that showed they were capable of an outlier result. Without it, I think they'd struggle. Early-stage startups move fast and ask a lot. Not everyone is built for that.

Filter 3: Low ego, high self-awareness

High intellectual horsepower plus big achievements can equal a very difficult person to work with. So the third filter matters just as much as the other two.

Like most hiring managers, I always ask about failure. The question itself isn’t the point. What matters is how the candidate chooses to respond, because that choice tells you a lot.

Some people go straight to ownership. They tell you specifically what went wrong, what their role in it was, what it felt like, and what they actually changed. That kind of answer is uncomfortable to give. Which is exactly why it’s so revealing when someone gives it anyway.

Others give you the humble brag. “I worked really hard, but the company made the wrong call.” That’s not self-awareness. That’s blame with a thin coating of humility. It tells me that when things go wrong at Seapoint, and they will, this person won’t own it.

I know this filter matters because I had to learn it the hard way. If we’re going to ask candidates to own their failures honestly, we have to do the same. My first leadership role was at Zalando. I took over a team of 150 people and spent the first six months running around telling everyone I had better answers than them. I thought I was being helpful. I was being insufferable. The feedback was direct and painful. And exactly what I needed.

How we actually find and hire people

At Seapoint, my standard is simple: every person I hire should be capable of being a founder themselves. Experienced enough to go it alone. But no ego about rolling up their sleeves and doing whatever needs doing. A lot of the Seapoint team were actually working on their own startup ideas before joining. That's not a coincidence.

For the time being, we don’t use a recruiter. At this stage, I don’t think we’re big enough to justify it. Hiring is too important to hand off. Every conversation tells you something about what the company needs; you lose that the moment you put someone in between. Every one of our first dozen hires at Seapoint came through a connection - either personal or one person removed. Not a job board, not a recruiter. Someone we knew, or someone a person we trusted knew well enough to recommend.

It puts pressure on the existing team to keep their networks warm and make introductions. But that's also a signal. The people who've joined Seapoint believe in what we're building enough to put their name behind someone. That matters.

One more thing

Joining a startup is a big deal for the person on the other side, too. High risk. Hopefully, high reward. But a real leap. These are people making decisions about their income, their security, their lives.

We welcomed five new babies within the Seapoint team last year. These are people with mortgages, young families, real responsibilities. They took a risk on us. That means we owe them a team worth joining, a bar worth maintaining, and a culture worth protecting.

Which is exactly why you can’t afford to get hiring wrong.

If Seapoint sounds like a place you’d like to work, we’re hiring. Check out our open roles here.