The 7 Hires a Hardware Startup Needs to Get Right

Non-engineering hires determine whether a great product becomes a great business.

America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts

We’re excited to welcome Connor Love who is joining a16z as a General Partner. Read more about it here. - Danco

When deploying physical hardware or dealing with a diverse set of stakeholders, business models become uniquely unforgiving. In a way, this is a good definition for what an “American Dynamism” company actually is. As a result, hiring has higher stakes for engineering and non-engineering roles alike.

Strong engineering is table stakes. Drones buzz, rockets boom, boats zoom, factories clang – the products grab attention like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. But the engineering feats that take center stage are just the beginning. Whether a great product ever becomes a great business is decided elsewhere, in the less-obvious functions like Manufacturing, Deployments, Supply Chain, Finance, Sales, Policy, and Marketing. Get these hires wrong and a remarkable product stalls out. Get them right and the rest of the company compounds. So, I spent the last few weeks talking to the most seasoned founders and operators about how they built these teams.

The core takeaway is probably obvious to most, but how to execute on it is less so. The best teams look for hires that have an instinct for what “great” looks like, developed through the crucible of a more established organization. Critically, however, they must not be so fanatical about a very-specific way of doing things — that is, that they can still adapt and fit into a new culture.

Below is how to find the right people for each critical function, and how to know it when you have.

Manufacturing

“You have to be creative here in the US. We are reindustrializing, but you can’t just go to a phone tree of power electronics manufacturing engineers. When we were building the 4680 facility in Texas [at Tesla], there weren’t a lot of battery operations in the United States, so you have to look for analogs. We were hiring people out of high-speed bottling plants, out of syringe manufacturing facilities where they’re making billions of units. If you can get that creative hat going, you find there is immense depth of talent in the US and people are excited to work in new industries.” - Drew Baglino, SVP Powertrain & Energy Engineering, Tesla; Founder & CEO, Heron Power

The conventional wisdom is that you hire manufacturing talent from other hardware companies. This is partly true but mostly limiting. When Drew Baglino and his team at Tesla launched the Texas 4680 battery facility — a 50 gigawatt-hour plant built in eleven months inside a former JC Penney warehouse — the hardest problem was staffing it. There were not enough battery manufacturing operators in Texas, let alone the entire United States, which forced a deeper question: where do the underlying skills they were looking for actually live, independent of domain?

While it’s true that the discipline of building millions of things on a single line has atrophied in the United States, there are some industries that were never offshored. Consumer packaged goods, for example, are difficult to offshore for a number of reasons I won’t get into here. The result is a pool of American talent that has made millions of a thing to a particularly demanding spec.

But the unfortunate reality for many manufacturing projects is that decades of offshoring really has created a shortage of manufacturing talent in the United States. In order to make it viable again, companies like Hadrian have had to get creative and use AI to fill the gaps. That doesn’t mean “replace humans” – in reality, it looks like Hadrian’s factories where building out software and automation made it much easier to hire the workers that were available, rather than none at all. This March, Hadrian’s Factory 4 opened in Cherokee, Alabama, and is expected to create 1,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs when fully operational.

Where to find: You might think hiring someone who worked in automotive or defense would make more sense, but the true skillset that Tesla was looking for was a relentless pursuit of volume and scale akin to Asian electronics conglomerates. Candidly, this was a type of scale and precision that was found in bottling plants, not missile factories. The domain expertise can be taught, the process discipline is hard to find.

How to recognize: The best manufacturing hires also recognize the value of co-locating engineering and manufacturing. Designing something that must be incredibly performant and made millions of times is challenging and requires tight departmental integration to break through local minima. The right question to sniff out aptitude here is to ask them to describe a project they completed with half the time, half the budget, and half the people it needed. They don’t necessarily need to have achieved this, but they should be able to walk you through how it might’ve been done, or where things went wrong.

Deployments

“The deployment hire isn’t someone who just manages a process. It’s someone who owns the outcome, whatever it takes to get there. The best Deployments folks mix engineering, operations, and raw scrappy horsepower”- Justin Lopas, Co-founder & COO, Base Power

The job is defined by things going wrong in ways nobody anticipated, but finding a way through anyway — all in front of customers. Most founders hire this function too late, after the first deployment goes badly. At that point, you have both a customer problem and a hiring problem, which is a lot to get hit with at once.

The actual right time to hire for this function is when you can see your first ten deployments on the horizon, and the best structure to start with is to pair hustlers with a technical expert who has seen your specific product fail in the field before. The hustlers will move fast and figure things out, while the expert provides the hard-won knowledge to leverage. High-volume deployments should also be conceptually thought of as an extension of the manufacturing line, and any deployment blockers should be iterated on the product side, too. The best part is no part, as they say.

In defense, the function is lower volume and takes more of the form of a forward-deployed engineering (FDE) team. Being in the field with customers establishes trust, can help guarantee the success of missions, and is often the best chance to understand real operational requirements that never survive the trip up the bureaucratic chain.

Where to find: Finding good deployment people is hard, mostly because there isn’t a large pool of folks who’ve done it before at a high-growth company — which is to say, have built the plane while flying it. Dana Paz is one such person; she joined Base Power from Anduril’s manufacturing team, admittedly knowing very little about energy. But she was a fast learner, could think on her feet, and build a motivated team quickly.

Her best hires came from even farther outside the sector: hungry new graduate engineers and SpaceX production coordinators were more down the fairway, but she also found veterans were particularly well suited for this role. Veterans who had operated in high-stakes, low-resource environments translated exceptionally well. Connecting a home battery in Austin is nothing compared to rucking through Appalachia, developing HUMINT relationships, or any type of “thinking on your feet” familiar to them.

How to recognize: Beyond pure grit, the interview signal to look for is curiosity that extends beyond the immediate task, the candidate who asks why, who thinks about the next step before being asked. This is a quality you take for granted hiring engineers, but is less of a given in operational roles.

Supply Chain

“The supply chain risk that stops production is almost never the one you’re watching. We lost two weeks of production because of a coating on a washer inside a motor assembly — a tier-five supplier in India that we didn’t even know existed. The tier-four didn’t check the tier-five and suddenly you’re on a plane to get a mom-and-pop coating operation back online. You have to hire people who can think many layers deep before something breaks, not after.” - RJ Scaringe, Rivian and Mind Robotics CEO

Supply chain is a lot like a game of Settlers of Catan. You are building roads, trading resources, managing scarce inputs, and trying to win against forces you can barely control. Your primary constraint isn’t really even finding suppliers, but convincing them to prioritize a company that isn’t spending enough money for them to care — which makes this a sales problem as much as an operational one. The person you need to hire for supply chain is equal parts negotiator, technical translator, and program manager.

That last point is worth emphasizing. In the early days, you will almost certainly be managing an unsustainable number of suppliers. The right supply chain hire is someone who can operate in that chaos without flinching, and who also knows when to make the strategic call to bring something in-house. Rivian started R1 with over 600 suppliers that required overwhelming coordination. On R2, they deliberately consolidated, accepting more concentration risk in exchange for less complexity. That judgment, when to absorb supplier breadth and when to insource, is one of the highest-leverage decisions a supply chain leader makes.

Where to find: The person you are looking for is a specific combination that does not map neatly to any single job title. Technical enough to understand how components actually function in the product. A negotiator’s instincts: careful, persistent, slightly-lawyerly disposition that can hold a supplier to a commitment made before the order was placed. And a program manager at heart, capable of coordinating across engineering and other internal teams with speed. Jesse Stevens, Base Power’s supply chain leader, came out of Tesla by way of Duke Energy, a pairing of a fast paced culture and seeing a supply chain work at scale that maps almost exactly onto what a commercial hardware company requires. The direct domain experience in energy is a cherry on top.

How to recognize: Scenario-based interviews work best in finding the right person. Give candidates real situations like a sudden tariff shift, a tier-one plant that burns down, a supplier that can’t ramp. Ask what they do, how they think, what dashboards they would build, what metrics they would track, etc. The right person will also be already thinking about whatever is happening in the world that day, too, not because they prepared for the interview, but because they find these things genuinely interesting. That kind of obsession (or paranoia) is hard to fake and easy to spot.

Finance

“Your CFO can’t just be a scorekeeper. Fifty percent of the value we create over the next decade is going to be capital optimization - so the person running finance has to understand the factory floor as well as the cap table, and they have to be a true partner to the founder to make the calls that make building this big possible.” — Chris Power, Founder & CEO, Hadrian

Before joining, Hadrian’s CFO, West Owens, spent decades as a financial operator in energy, one of the most volatile industries of the time. As CFO of TerraWatt Infrastructure and VP of Structured Finance at SolarCity, Owens built the kind of experience managing capital through genuine adversity, not just growth, that many finance leaders simply don’t have. It’s also experience junior talent wants to learn from.

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Finance is categorically harder for hardware companies because there is no wiggle room. Software companies can adjust prices, cut headcount, move people across orgs, and rationalize spending in interesting ways. But when you bid a fixed-price hardware contract today, you are locking in your cost assumptions for five to ten years, and it’s hard to get back on track if you don’t have a clear handle on your finances from the beginning. This is also why finance ends up being the glue across the org: the finance leader is joined at the hip with manufacturing and supply chain, has to speak their language, and only finds the right solution when the three of them work it out together.

The right time to bring on a dedicated finance function is when the team can’t track what it is actually spending. For a hard tech company with a complicated supply chain, confusing contract timelines, and purchase orders charging on irregular schedules, that moment comes earlier than most founders expect – and the first person you bring on may not be the one you eventually call CFO. RJ Scaringe, Rivian and Mind Robotics CEO, frames early finance hires as a choice between architectural CFO-types, who think in big structural moves and strategic capital allocation, and the operational controller-type, who drives consistent execution month over month. That first hire is more likely the latter and could come from a variety of places: straight off a trading floor, private equity, operating within a company under a strong finance leader. What matters is that they bring the controls and audit rigor of a large company without the bureaucracy.

An architectural CFO looks beyond the P&L. At scale these companies weigh every source of capital – debt, non-dilutive funding, project-level financing. But early on the menu is thinner: the first dollars in are usually just venture dollars, and they stay that way until an F2 or F3 (read: the second or third factory, once the first has proven the line can be built and repeated) is running. Early factories double as prototypes, before the financial profile is legible enough to attract anything else. The job in that window is less about exotic capital structure than earning the right to it – finding the metric that justifies the massive upfront investment, whether unit economics, production volume, or the path the P&L takes, and being able to say plainly why an investor should be excited. That takes charisma and executive presence to explain the art of what’s possible, to investors and employees alike. It maps onto all five dimensions Brian Roberts, GP at a16z and former CFO at Lyft and Splunk, identifies as key for CFOs: leadership presence, long-game capital allocation, founder-like intensity, the ability to distill complexity, and standing as a true peer to the CEO. Eventually all hardware companies need to graduate to this strategic CFO archetype. The primary job is to give everyone confidence that the company will not run out of money. When that confidence exists, board conversations shift from defensive survival to offensive strategy.

Real estate deserves specific mention, too. Decisions around when to move, how much space, and how physical footprint maps to manufacturing capacity, are financial decisions as much as operational ones.

Where to find: Some of the best American Dynamism finance hires grew restless in banking and wanted to work on something meaningful — but banking is one source, not the source. Claire Rauh McDonough, Rivian’s current CFO, came from traditional banking with deep capital markets experience and little operational background, but earlier finance hires had been more execution-oriented. The first hire (not CFO) will likely be that operational archetype and could be in traditional finance or already inside an operating company.

How to recognize: Ask every finance candidate, especially those coming from banking, “what gets you out of bed in the morning?” Finance is the function most likely to attract candidates who have been trained, explicitly or implicitly, to optimize for title and compensation. That conditioning is hard to undo and easy to miss in a standard interview, even more so because they’re often well-practiced interviewers. The answers you’re looking for are specific and personal, and tend to come from the person who finds the manufacturing line as interesting as the cap table.

Sales

“The fastest path to a defense contract doesn’t always start with the most senior relationship in the building. It starts with identifying the right program office at the right moment in the budget cycle, and being in the right conversations six to twelve months before the RFP drops.” - Bryon Hargis, Founder & CEO, Castelion

It’s natural to want to look at what Palantir and Anduril did across government and large enterprise sales as a playbook, but the honest truth is that their effectiveness in breaking down barriers has created a much more legible path for companies today. And while government procurement and utilities sales cycles remain far from perfect — something we at a16z spend lots of time trying to improve — the Pentagon is much more forward-leaning and excited about adopting new technology, and other highly regulated buyers are on their way there, too. In practice this means educating customers is less of the job, so sales teams can stay leaner longer (and you don’t need to sue the government to win a contract). Yet, despite this narrative shift, you have to keep in perspective that the primes are still taking home the lion’s share of DoW revenue and relationships with buyers are still what matters most.

The first thing Scott Sanders will tell you about government sales is that you cannot hire your way out of early stage sales pain. Sanders was one of Anduril’s earliest sales and business development hires, yet he knows the starting point must be the same for every company: Founders need to hold the function until the motion is working and they understand why. Not because founders are always the best at it, but because you cannot evaluate whether someone else is doing it well until you have done it yourself. In defense, the function can be broken down into four activities that need coverage: relationships with budget holders, relationships with the acquisition arm, relationships with end users, and technical writing for proposals. Sometimes you find a unicorn like Sanders who can do all of the first three, but more often it ends up being several people, each stronger in one area than the others. Building relationships with budget appropriators, mainly Congress, also matters but is something you can hire government affairs firms to help with.

The most common misstep is often confusing the budget holder, the acquisition arm, and end users. As Vib Altekar, Co-Founder and CTO of Saronic, puts it, “People think getting in front of individuals with big titles is the win. But they might have zero budgetary authority. They can tell you the problem, but they can’t buy the solution.” Being able to distinguish these three categories is critical to successfully navigating government sales. That said, the end user relationship can often be underrated. This hire is really a product liaison, working on translating what the customer actually needs into something engineering can build, and fighting internally when the company is doing the wrong thing by the customer.

Technical writing can be outsourced early and brought in-house when volume demands it, but it scales into more than writing. Mature defense sales orgs end up with dedicated proposal managers who know each customer’s house style, and contracting specialists who live inside a single organization’s process, because SOCOM, NAVSEA, and the Air Force each run their own. Saronic’s Navy contracts run through a younger hire who came straight out of NAVSEA. The knowledge of how one shop actually moves paper is specific enough to be worth a dedicated seat.

Most of this advice applies to sales generally across regulated industries, not just government. In energy for example you are often working with long sale cycles and lots of regulation. Understanding these industries well enough to know who the budget holders, end users, and other players are is necessary to landing these sales.

Where to find: Context and relationships in these spaces are not just helpful. They are compounding. In most regulated markets you want to look for someone with strong sales experience who can learn and traverse these industries or raw hustle and genuine curiosity about how they work.

In government sales the profiles that work tend to have either end user experience (from a military or intelligence community) or have been part of the acquisition process (from either government, a prime, or another defense startup). If they come from a prime, make sure they actually won contracts rather than inherited them. If they come from another startup, make sure it was one with real contract wins.

The government affairs component is its own hire and often ties into Policy (more to come later), and the best ones are almost evangelical about their cause. Not people who rotate between clients and causes, but people who have decided that this mission specifically is worth their time and credibility.

How to recognize: The evaluation criteria that work across the first three are the same. Ask candidates to walk through their decision-making process on an ambiguous problem with no right answer. The government sales hire worth making has tenacity, gets kicked ninety-nine times and shows up for the hundredth, has technical competence sufficient to not get caught bluffing by a program office that has seen every variety of overstatement, and the listening instinct to understand what a customer actually needs. Context accelerates. Problem-solving is the requirement.

Policy

“The hardest thing to find in a policy hire is someone who can speak both languages fluently. Technical enough to understand what the product actually does. Washington enough to know how to present it without scaring people. Our first policy lesson at Radiant was that you can be completely right about the technology and still lose the room if you don’t know how to translate it.” - Tori Shivanandan, President & COO, Radiant

If you are a lawyer reading this, please know that I see you, I respect you, and I am a little afraid of you. The policy function is genuinely nuanced, and I recognize the moment I say something definitive about it, someone with a JD is going to tell me exactly why I am wrong. And they will probably be partly right.

The function is often divided under either Legal or go-to-market – or both. Where it lands depends on a simple question: Will a policy failure kill the company? If the answer is yes, often the case for energy and public safety companies, policy work will sit under Legal. If the answer is no, as it is for many defense companies where the primary value of policy is tactical partnerships and access, the function can sit in go-to-market.

Saronic has both. Under GTM, the role is more government relations and looks like lobbying, budget, and relationship work. Under Legal, the work is slower and more technical, focused most often on shaping the legislative landscape so a company is able to operate freely. That might mean securing DHS waivers so an autonomous cargo ship can sail from Puerto Rico to Houston or working with Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to shape technology policy for the industrial base.

The credibility and reputation of these hires matters most. Three of Radiant’s five executives have PhDs, not because the policy work is purely technical, but because the intellectual firepower required to gain the respect of government experts and regulators demands it. The team is also deliberately structured as translators first: Rita Baranwal’s, Radiant’s Chief Nuclear Officer, earliest lesson at Radiant was not about the regulations themselves, she knows those well, but about how to present the technology without shoving it in peoples faces. Being right about the engineering is not enough. You have to know how to say it and how to get people to believe in the future you are building.

Where to find them: The two functions draw from different pools. Government relations hires tend to come out of the major lobbying firms or from Capitol Hill. The legal and regulatory side follow classic legal paths: big law, maybe a tour through the DOJ or the State Department, often private industry experience.

The right evaluation question: Unlike other roles, context and relationships are not a nice-to-have. They are the job. A policy hire without government experience in the relevant domain, a real network, or the cultural fluency to speak the language of the institutions they are navigating is not set up to succeed. The best lawyers also have won cases where the cards were stacked against them. Asking about underdog scenarios can tell you a lot.

Marketing

“Defense companies fail at communications when they assume complexity is an excuse for vagueness. Our job is the opposite: take a business most people find opaque and make the argument so clear and interesting that the right customer, the right hire, and the right regulator all arrive at the same conclusion on their own.” - Shannon Prior, Head of Communications, Anduril Industries

All startups have to cater their messaging to future customers, talent, and investors. But American Dynamism companies have to tell the stories of complicated businesses clearly. And to a wider variety of talent and regulators, too. The companies that build this muscle early build a flywheel that makes every other hire easier.

The shape of this function can vary from “growth” to “marketing” to “comms” in the early days, but the unsurprising throughline is that creativity is a must. Hiring from either outside the industry or outside of traditional marketing backgrounds can be a hack for this because those hires will, by design, have to get creative.

High-slope, early marketing hires don’t always even need to come from traditional marketing. Cole Jones, who leads Growth (and marketing) at Base Power, is an example of this. He joined Base as one of the first employees from SpaceX where he had gone from an ops engineer to a senior product growth manager, but never a traditional marketing role. This jack-of-all-trades kind of early growth hire has positive side effects. Hires internalize and project a message that isn’t just the mission but, as cheesy as it sounds, the identity of the company. Marketing that’s been developed truly with a company is more authentic and resonates with audiences more.

Where to find: When you hire from traditional marketing backgrounds, the industry to hire from is likely not the one you’re building in. You don’t want to produce communications that sound like every other company in your industry because the messaging becomes invisible to the audience. At Anduril, Shannon Prior, VP & Head of Global Communications, came from Hulu and Mozilla and Jeff Miller, VP of Marketing, came from PepsiCo and Snap. Turns out consumer companies spike in Marketing for a reason!

Anduril’s “Don’t Work at Anduril” did not go viral just because it was clever. It was honest: a blunt message with no attempt to smooth over the hard parts. The people it repelled were exactly those Anduril didn’t want. Base Power’s “Don’t tell your grandkids all you did was B2B SaaS” meets the target candidate where they are, acknowledges the comfortable alternative, and makes the case without overselling it. Both campaigns need a foil and lead with the hard parts instead of hiding them.

How to recognize: Ask what company in the space gets its marketing completely wrong. A good answer comes fast, names names, and gets specific about which audiences are being missed and why. A great answer follows up with what they would do differently as CMO. What you are screening for is immediate conviction, concrete tactical thinking, and a clear point of view. A candidate who hedges, speaks in generalities, or can’t think of anyone is telling you something important.

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These foundational hires compound. A great manufacturing leader shapes what engineering gets to bring to reality. A great deployment lead closes the feedback loop that the product team might otherwise miss. A great policy leader has a voice in the room when requirements are written that shape company roadmaps. A great marketing hire makes every engineering role easier to fill.

None of these functions are glamorous. They don’t get the stage time that a successful launch or a breakthrough prototype does. But they are the difference between a company that builds something remarkable and one that actually becomes something. In hindsight, the product was almost the easy part.

Connor Love

Investing in Neo

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