I’ll never forget it. About eight months into my company’s operational life, I was finishing up our board meeting. Our first product was being ready for launch right on schedule, and our investors were very happy with our progress.
One of our investors, “Raul” asked me, “Why are you holding hiring flat?” He just didn’t understand it. So I explained that we were holding hiring flat because we wanted to extend our financial runway until we saw revenue growing.
Raul looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll support you.” It’s a classic VC saying that I’ll get back to this later. However, scaling your startup is usually related to scaling your team. So let’s start with:
Key number one. It takes people to scale, so recruiting your team from day zero is paramount.
You always want to be one step ahead as a CEO, so even if you don’t need people at the start, you’re going to need people at some point pretty quickly. That’s why you want to be always recruiting.
For most startups, including ours, the focus was on hiring engineers, but here’s where you can get into trouble. Let’s say you need five engineers in the next twelve months and you hire these engineers, so you’ve reached your goal.
