Steve Jobs said the thing he spent the most amount of time doing is recruiting. For a company (especially a startup, where individual contributions matter a lot more), having and retaining A players is crucial. If you’re picking a cofounder, you’re essentially picking 50% of the company! If you’re picking your 10th employee, that’s still 10% (and so on). Laying this solid foundation is crucial to all future growth. I appreciate the advice!
Engineering builds the technical baseline, but supply chain and manufacturing functions ultimately govern your production deployment velocity. The hardest trade-off is hiring experienced operators who can adapt institutional rigor to early-stage chaos without paralyzing cycle times with premature, enterprise-level bureaucracy.
Good list, and it transfers almost one-for-one to biotech and medtech, with one addition hardware founders can get away with ignoring and life sciences founders cannot: the quality and regulatory hire. In a regulated product you are not only building the thing, you are building the evidence that it was built the way you said it was, and that evidence has to start at the first engineering batch. Hiring that person at seed stage feels premature and almost never is - retrofitting design history, supplier qualification and change control after the fact is one of the most expensive mistakes a young company makes. One more pattern worth naming: your first operations hire should be someone who has scaled a process, not someone who has run one at steady state. Completely different skill, and the CVs look identical. On where that early talent actually comes from in the Dutch ecosystem: https://www.sire-search.com/life-sciences-startups-nederland-kansen-carriere/
Software-first founders moving into hardware often try to replicate their AI hiring playbook here, and it breaks. In software you can hire generalists and let the product iterate its way to fit. Hardware punishes that because a bad regulatory or manufacturing hire costs you a physical recall, not a patch. Did you find founders coming from pure software backgrounds struggled more with this list?
Long read but loved every minute of it. This is exactly what I talk about all the time. At each stage, an entity needs a different skill set for the finance head, CFO or not. Setting the finance foundation from the get go is the most important decision a founder can make. The foundation that is a systems first (any system that can scale is good. I am not saying you get Oracle when you need QBO) and then building out your COAs to industry standards and keep moving. This saves you headaches in the long run whether you have are at F1/F2 or beyond.
All those functional areas and no mention of one of the most critical needs of all -- a CIO who is state-of-the-art in all areas of AI and info technology. Someone who can lead in implementing innovative state of the art software that provides a basis for the company's multiple stages of growth.
All legit must haves but… One critical omission is the right recruiter as early as possible. Hardware is hard and even harder at the early stages, the wrong hires into the roles mentioned could be crippling, you need an architect to draft a hiring strategy.
Steve Jobs said the thing he spent the most amount of time doing is recruiting. For a company (especially a startup, where individual contributions matter a lot more), having and retaining A players is crucial. If you’re picking a cofounder, you’re essentially picking 50% of the company! If you’re picking your 10th employee, that’s still 10% (and so on). Laying this solid foundation is crucial to all future growth. I appreciate the advice!
Engineering builds the technical baseline, but supply chain and manufacturing functions ultimately govern your production deployment velocity. The hardest trade-off is hiring experienced operators who can adapt institutional rigor to early-stage chaos without paralyzing cycle times with premature, enterprise-level bureaucracy.
Good list, and it transfers almost one-for-one to biotech and medtech, with one addition hardware founders can get away with ignoring and life sciences founders cannot: the quality and regulatory hire. In a regulated product you are not only building the thing, you are building the evidence that it was built the way you said it was, and that evidence has to start at the first engineering batch. Hiring that person at seed stage feels premature and almost never is - retrofitting design history, supplier qualification and change control after the fact is one of the most expensive mistakes a young company makes. One more pattern worth naming: your first operations hire should be someone who has scaled a process, not someone who has run one at steady state. Completely different skill, and the CVs look identical. On where that early talent actually comes from in the Dutch ecosystem: https://www.sire-search.com/life-sciences-startups-nederland-kansen-carriere/
These are especially critical as infrastructure shifts from AI intelligence to hardware robotics.
Software-first founders moving into hardware often try to replicate their AI hiring playbook here, and it breaks. In software you can hire generalists and let the product iterate its way to fit. Hardware punishes that because a bad regulatory or manufacturing hire costs you a physical recall, not a patch. Did you find founders coming from pure software backgrounds struggled more with this list?
Say it louder for the founders in the back.
Long read but loved every minute of it. This is exactly what I talk about all the time. At each stage, an entity needs a different skill set for the finance head, CFO or not. Setting the finance foundation from the get go is the most important decision a founder can make. The foundation that is a systems first (any system that can scale is good. I am not saying you get Oracle when you need QBO) and then building out your COAs to industry standards and keep moving. This saves you headaches in the long run whether you have are at F1/F2 or beyond.
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https://substack.com/@thehonesttcornerr?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=82j2ac
All those functional areas and no mention of one of the most critical needs of all -- a CIO who is state-of-the-art in all areas of AI and info technology. Someone who can lead in implementing innovative state of the art software that provides a basis for the company's multiple stages of growth.
All legit must haves but… One critical omission is the right recruiter as early as possible. Hardware is hard and even harder at the early stages, the wrong hires into the roles mentioned could be crippling, you need an architect to draft a hiring strategy.