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Comment by greenspot | Hacker News Reader

> Doer-in-Chief. You must be deeply involved in both building the product (observing/interacting with users, writing code, designing product specs)

I slightly disagree here, I would rather start with the Second Job or Phase 2, 'Hiring a Leadership Team and Making Sure They Work Well Together'. The more you focus on finding and setting up the best team early on the better. You can do yourself a prototype, write code or do market research to see if you are on the right track. However, I recommend to setup the founding or leadership team before anything else. Once you have the team in place the project gets momentum and pace will be 100x compared to before. And finding the team plus setting up all legal matters will be a full-time job your first weeks if not months.

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Executive is a very different skillset from individual contributor, and hiring executives too early on in your company's life is a huge mistake. They have nobody to manage; their strength is in coordinating lots of different people, but you can't afford lots of people. And their presence will be demoralizing to the strong individual contributors who you do need to build the product, because somebody who's rolling their hands up and getting dirty with code or sales is understandably resentful of someone placed above them, drawing a fat salary, who does nothing but give orders that are at best tangentially related to the actual problems your startup faces.

(Source: once worked at a startup with a CEO, 3 VPs, a Chief Architect, 5 engineers, and 6 high-school kids. Yeah, they didn't ship.)

Over-hiring executives early in a company's life is one of the biggest anti-patterns out there. Their skills are, at best, tangential to your early-stage needs and the suck up money, time, and attention that would otherwise go towards getting things done.

If you and your co-founders are not capable of being the sole executives in your (early-stage) startup, you should seriously reconsider your team.

How do you pay all those people?

Good question and this will be the biggest challenge. The answer is equity. But be careful before giving too much equity too easy away. You should have a big pipeline of candidates and know exactly what you expect from whom and how much you are willing to give away and on what conditions. At the beginning some might join your venture full-time, some not. Latter ones are easy to get but eventually it might be hard to get them out of the current jobs if the prospects are not to positive or let's say the first round is rather small.

Once in later funding stages (A, B) you have much better financial power and thus, you'll update or upgrade your senior management team anyway.

> The answer is equity

How realistic is it to bet your company on people working for equity? In its early days most rational people will not join a startup for equity alone. A few will join for cash and comp; for most,cash alone is good enough.

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