Hiring your early team

Part six of Lenny Rachitsky's B2B startup series covers hiring an early team, organized around four questions: who to hire first, where to find people, how to persuade them to join, and when to bring on a salesperson. It draws on interviews with founders of companies like Segment, Linear, and Databricks to show common patterns, such as engineers as first hires and founder-led sales before a first full-time seller.

01Key takeaways

• Engineers are the most common first hire, though founders sometimes prioritize a recruiter, compliance expert, PM, or customer success person to fill a critical gap.
• Friends and former colleagues are the top source for early hires, with cold outreach via LinkedIn and GitHub a strong second channel.
• Founder-led sales usually comes first; hire a full-time salesperson once you can sell consistently, feel bored, or are overwhelmed by inbound.
• Many founders hired a first salesperson somewhere around $300-500k ARR, and some waited much longer.
• Favor hungry senior account executives who can break new ground over repeatable-process sellers when making your first sales hire.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.