How to hire your first 10 people

I’ve built teams from zero to one a few times — three startups in my twenties, the drone delivery team at Google X (three people to around 200), Stripe’s engineering team in Europe (10 to 100 in eighteen months), and now Seapoint (0 to 23).

The one thing I can’t stress enough: hiring your founding team is the most important thing you do as a founder. You have three core jobs — access talent, access capital, access customers — and talent comes first, because it’s the compounding factor that makes the other two easier.

Here’s the whole playbook in short:

• Your first 10 are founding hires, not scaling hires. Hire people who could still be leading a team of 100 in five years.
• Hire for the bottleneck. Every hire should answer one question: how do we go faster?
• Start with people you’ve worked with. These are high-trust roles, and trust is the shortcut.
• No network for a role? Interview at volume. You can’t spot exceptional until you’ve seen enough average.
• The best people aren’t looking. Outbound is your job, and it’s a sales motion before it’s an assessment.
• Run every candidate through three filters: intellectual horsepower, an outlier achievement, and low ego.
• Hire AI-native. One strong IC with a few agents now does the work of several people.
• Use a case study. It’s the clearest test of whether someone has real agency.
• In the debrief, fear four bland yeses. Back the candidate someone will fight for.

If the list is all you take, that’s enough to change how you hire. The detail is below.

Your first 10 are founding hires

The first person in a role owns it from zero to one, and that’s a completely different job from taking something from one to ten. So I hire for the five-year version of the role: could this person still be on the leadership team when we’re 100 people, running and scaling a whole function? The most common mistake is hiring someone for year one, then hiring someone above them at 10, then again at 100. The profile I look for is a strong individual contributor who’s just moved into management — senior enough to have real autonomy, not so senior they’ve forgotten how to do the work themselves.

Hire for the bottleneck

The order you hire in should match wherever the company is slowest. My first hire at Seapoint was Jeremy, our partnerships lead, because securing financial licences was the thing standing between us and a product. We didn’t bring in a full-time go-to-market person until a year in, because that wasn’t the constraint yet — I was doing founder sales. A related rule: don’t hire for a role you haven’t done yourself. If you can’t sell to customers as the founder, you won’t know who to hire to do it, or what good looks like.

Start with people you’ve worked with

Founding roles are high-trust. You need to know someone can run without oversight and will fit the culture, and the fastest way to know that is to have already worked with them. Six or seven of our first ten engineers came from Stripe, and the rest came through them. Whenever a role opens, the first question I ask the team is: who are the best people you’ve ever worked with, and will you go have a coffee with them?

No network? Interview at volume

Sometimes you have no one in your network for a role. For us that was design, go-to-market, and community. There’s no shortcut — you meet a lot of people. Building the go-to-market team, we interviewed 60 or 70 people over three months. It’s a slog, but volume is what sets your bar. We only knew Harry was exceptional because we’d met 30 or 40 salespeople first and knew exactly what average looked like. There’s nothing worse than “good enough” on a founding team.

The best people aren’t looking

The biggest failure mode I see is posting a job and waiting for applications. Whoever’s on the market with a CV ready today is, more often than not, someone who isn’t thriving where they are. The genuinely exceptional people are happy, getting promoted, and not looking — so you have to go and get them. Outbound is the founder’s job: a note from the founder lands very differently from a recruiter’s. And treat it as a sales motion first — get them excited about the company, then work out whether they’re the right fit.

Three filters

I run every candidate through three filters:

• Intellectual horsepower — real curiosity and a fast learning loop. You can teach someone fintech; you can’t teach this. In a startup they’ll face 15 problems they’ve never seen, so I’ll take curiosity over a playbook every time.
• An outlier achievement — something they’ve been top 1% at, in work or in life. If someone’s had a few decades and never committed to being exceptional at anything, they’re unlikely to start now.
• Low ego — can they talk honestly about a real failure and what they learned from it? My favourite question is “walk me through a great failure in your career.” No amount of talent is worth a bad culture fit.

Hire AI-native

We interview for this now, in every function. A strong individual contributor who genuinely uses AI — running a few agents at once to automate parts of their own job — produces the output that used to take several people. In an early-stage company where speed is everything, that’s decisive. We even flipped our engineering case study: we used to ask candidates not to use AI, and now we ask them to show us exactly how they do.

Use a case study

A case study is the clearest signal of agency. Make it specific enough to give direction, but not so prescriptive that you remove the room for someone to run. The best candidates come back having talked to five people, researched things you never asked for, and clearly enjoyed the work. That’s much harder to see in an interview.

Fear four bland yeses

Once everyone has interviewed the candidate, we get in a room — and no one is allowed to discuss them beforehand, so opinions stay unbiased. Everyone gives a strong yes, yes, no, or strong no. Four flat yeses is the worst outcome: nobody’s excited, nobody will fight for this person. The best hires are often spiky — two strong yeses and a couple of nos — as long as the nos are coachable. No fintech experience is coachable. Arrogance isn’t.

Why this matters to me

The list above is really one argument: your time as a founder is the scarcest thing in the company, so spend it on the few things only you can do — talent, capital, customers. Everything else you should be getting off your plate.

That’s why we built Seapoint. Most founders lose hours every week to their finance stack — a business account in one place, treasury in another, invoices and bookkeeping stitched together by hand. Seapoint brings it into one: a business account, treasury, and your accounting tools like Xero and QuickBooks connected, with invoices pulled straight from your inbox and categorised for your accountant. Setup takes about ten minutes and three fields — no digging out incorporation documents. It’s the financial home for your startup, so you can get back to building the team.

Start with Seapoint →