The first hire is the one that breaks founders. Not because it is the hardest, it is not, the fifth and sixth are harder, but because most founders have never hired anyone, and the process they invent from scratch is usually a slow, anxious approximation of what a large company does. Phone screens. Competency frameworks. Panel interviews. Reference checks on people they already know they want. Six weeks of process for a decision they made in the first twenty minutes.
The ten hires after the first are where the company actually gets built. And the way you make those hires, who you find, how you talk to them, what you offer, shapes the team you will be running two years from now more than almost any product decision you will make.
Here is what actually works, without a recruiter, without an HR department, and without a budget for either.
Where to find people who are not already looking
Job boards attract people who are actively searching. That pool is fine and you should not ignore it, but the best early hires are usually not refreshing LinkedIn Jobs. They are working somewhere, quietly frustrated, and open to a conversation if the right one arrives.
The most reliable sourcing channel at the early stage is the second-degree network. Not your close contacts, you have probably already exhausted those, but your contacts’ contacts. A short message to twenty people you know well, asking specifically for introductions to strong engineers or operators in a particular space, will surface more qualified candidates than three weeks on a job board. The key word is specifically. “Let me know if you know anyone good” produces nothing. “I’m looking for a backend engineer with payments experience, ideally someone who has worked at a fintech or a bank” produces introductions.
Alumni networks work the same way and are underused. If you or your co-founders went to university, the alumni directory is a warm list of people who will at minimum read your message. A short, honest note about what you are building and what you need will get a response rate that cold outreach will not.
For technical roles, GitHub and open-source contribution history are public sourcing databases that most early-stage founders never touch. Find repositories adjacent to your stack, look at who is committing consistently and writing readable code, and reach out. GitHub Discussions threads in relevant open-source projects are also worth scanning. The people asking and answering precise questions are often the ones you want. The conversion rate is low, but the quality of the people you find is high.
Structured platforms help too. Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent) and Y Combinator’s “Work at a Startup” board skew toward candidates who have already opted into the early-stage context, which filters out some of the mismatch problems you encounter elsewhere. In MENA, Bayt and Wuzzuf are the dominant job boards and worth posting to for roles based in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf; their candidate density in those markets is higher than any international alternative.
The screening conversation
Most early-stage founders screen too formally or not at all. The formal version is a mistake because it signals that you have borrowed a process from a company ten times your size, and sharp candidates notice. The informal version, a loose chat with no structure, is a mistake because you end up hiring people you like talking to, which is not the same as people who can do the work.
The screening conversation should take thirty minutes and answer three questions. Can this person do the specific job? Will they do it in the specific conditions of an early-stage company, which means ambiguity, changing priorities, and limited support? And do they understand what they are signing up for?
The third question is the one founders skip. A strong engineer who has spent five years at a well-resourced company may be technically excellent and genuinely unsuited to a team of six where nobody owns the deployment pipeline yet. Finding this out in the screening conversation is a kindness to both of you.
One question that surfaces a lot: “Tell me about a time you had to figure something out with no one to ask.” The answer is not really about the specific story. It is about whether the person has ever been in that situation and whether they found it energizing or exhausting.
The work sample, used correctly
A work sample or short paid task is the most reliable signal you have for most roles. Not a five-hour unpaid take-home that candidates who are currently employed cannot reasonably complete. A focused, two-hour paid task that mirrors something close to the actual work.
Pay for it. The amount matters less than the act. Fifty dollars for two hours of a candidate’s time signals that you respect their time and that you are serious. It also filters out candidates who are not serious about you.
Keep the brief tight. A vague prompt produces vague output and tells you nothing useful. A specific, constrained problem, “here is a real data set from our product, what do you see in it” or “here is a bug in our codebase, walk us through how you would approach it,” tells you how someone actually thinks.
For non-technical roles, the work sample should still be concrete. A growth hire might be asked to sketch a distribution plan for a specific piece of content. An operations hire might be given a real process problem and asked to propose a fix. The goal is not to get free work done. The goal is to see how someone approaches a problem before you are committed to each other.
The offer conversation
The offer conversation is not a negotiation you want to win. It is a conversation you want to end with someone genuinely excited to join, clear on what they are agreeing to, and without a bad feeling that surfaces six months later.
Say the number first. Founders who wait for the candidate to name a number are playing a game that makes everyone uncomfortable and produces no useful information. You know your budget. State it plainly, explain how you got there, and leave room for a real conversation about equity, flexibility, and the things that matter to this specific person.
On equity: most early-stage candidates do not understand how startup equity works, and some of them will pretend they do. The honest thing is to explain the mechanics yourself, what percentage, what the current valuation is, what dilution typically looks like over time, and what the realistic range of outcomes is. Candidates who have been burned by equity before will appreciate the transparency. Candidates who have not will learn something useful. Neither group will hold the honesty against you.
What the offer letter should actually say
The offer letter is where verbal agreements become real, and vague offer letters cause more six-month problems than vague interview conversations. Keep it short; cover these six elements:
- Title: the exact role, not a generic label.
- Cash comp and currency: the number, stated in the currency it will be paid in. In Lebanon and increasingly across MENA, this means USD, not local-currency equivalent.
- Equity grant: the percentage or share count, the vesting schedule, and the cliff. If there is no equity, say so rather than leaving it implicit.
- Conditions: remote, hybrid, or in-office, and where. “Remote” in a country with uncertain power infrastructure means something different than “remote” in Berlin.
- Expected start date: a specific date or a clear window, not “ASAP.”
- Scope statement: one sentence describing what this person owns. “Responsible for all growth experiments through Series A” is enough. It gives the hire something to hold you to.
What to pay when you can’t pay market
This is the question every early-stage founder is actually asking, and it is the one the HR-tech blog posts refuse to answer directly.
The honest answer is: less than market, more than you think you can afford, and with equity and conditions that make the gap feel worth it.
“Less than market” is not a scandal at an early-stage company. It is the deal. The candidate is taking a risk on you and on the company, and the compensation structure should reflect that risk honestly rather than pretending it does not exist. What is a scandal is paying below market and offering thin equity and describing the conditions as a “startup environment” without explaining what that means.
The floor is roughly this: the person should be able to live without financial stress on what you are paying them. A hire who is worried about rent is not going to do their best work, and the stress will surface in ways that cost you more than the salary savings. If you cannot clear that floor, you are not ready to make that hire yet.
For benchmarking cash comp, Levels.fyi has the densest data but skews heavily toward the US; treat it as a ceiling reference, not a target. Pave and Ravio publish SaaS-specific compensation benchmarks that are more useful for startups calibrating against peer companies at similar stages.
On equity, the rough early-stage benchmarks for a first ten hires at a pre-seed or seed company:
- First engineering hire: 0.5–1.5%, depending on stage and seniority
- First non-technical operator or growth hire: 0.25–0.75%
- First senior or head-of hire: 0.5–2%, depending on what they are walking away from
These are starting points, not rules. The right number depends on your cap table, your stage, and what you have already promised to earlier hires.
A note on Lebanon and the pound
If you are hiring in Lebanon specifically, the compensation conversation has a layer that does not exist elsewhere.
Since 2019, the Lebanese pound has lost more than ninety-five percent of its value against the dollar. Salaries denominated in pounds became effectively worthless. The result is that almost every serious professional in Lebanon now expects to be paid in USD, either directly or pegged to it, and any offer denominated in local currency will be read as either naive or dishonest.
The practical implication: state the currency explicitly in the offer letter. “USD equivalent at the official rate” and “fresh dollars” mean very different things in Lebanon. Fresh dollars means physical USD or funds held in accounts outside the Lebanese banking system, as distinct from pre-2019 deposits trapped inside Lebanese banks (sometimes called “lollars”) that remain effectively inaccessible. Candidates will ask which you mean. The clearest offers are denominated in USD and paid in USD, USDT, or USDC. Anything else requires an explanation, and the explanation should be in the offer letter, not in a follow-up conversation three weeks later.
Almost every serious professional in Lebanon now expects to be paid in dollars, and any offer denominated in local currency will be read as either naive or dishonest.
For founders based outside Lebanon who are hiring into it: the talent is real, the cost is lower than most Western markets, and the candidates are often overqualified by the metrics you are used to using. The risk is retention. A strong engineer in Beirut is one recruiter message away from a remote role at a European or American company paying three times what you can offer. The counter is not matching the number, you probably cannot. The counter is the work itself, the ownership, and the speed of the environment. Some people find that genuinely compelling. Some do not, and it is better to know early.
The diaspora question
For MENA-based companies specifically, the diaspora is a sourcing channel that gets discussed vaguely and used poorly.
There are large communities of Lebanese, Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Syrian engineers and operators working across London, Berlin, Paris, the Bay Area, Toronto, and Dubai. The interest in working with regional companies is real but conditional. Most of them are not going to relocate. What they will often consider is a remote role, an advisory arrangement, or a part-time engagement that lets them maintain their current base while contributing to something they feel connected to.
The hiring vehicle matters here. Bringing on a diaspora candidate as a direct employee across borders means dealing with their country of residence’s tax law, labor law, and payroll requirements, not yours. The practical path for most early-stage companies is an Employer of Record service: Deel, Remote, and Oyster all handle cross-border employment in most of the relevant jurisdictions and take the compliance burden off your cap. It costs more than direct hire, but the alternative is getting it wrong quietly until it becomes a problem.
If you are considering classifying a diaspora hire as a contractor instead, the arrangement has to actually be contractor-shaped: output-based deliverables, no fixed hours, no exclusivity language. A contractor relationship with a fixed schedule and day-to-day direction looks like employment in most European and North American jurisdictions, and misclassification exposure sits with you, not with them.
The pitch that works is not nostalgia. It is the work. A diaspora engineer who left Beirut for London is not going to take a pay cut to feel closer to home. They might take a meaningful role at an interesting company that happens to be based in the region, if the work is genuinely good and the equity is real.
The pitch that does not work is “come back and help build the country.” It is not wrong, exactly, but it asks the candidate to carry the weight of your fundraising story, and the best candidates have heard it before.
What the first ten hires have in common
Looking back at the early teams that held together and the ones that did not, the common thread in the ones that worked is not skill level or pedigree. It is that each person had a clear answer to the question of why they joined this specific company at this specific moment, and the answer was not primarily the money.
The first ten hires are making a bet on you as much as on the company. The founders who make those hires well are the ones who are honest about what the bet involves, the upside, the risk, the conditions, and the realistic shape of the next two years, and who give candidates the information they need to make it clearly.
The founders who struggle are usually the ones who sell too hard and disclose too little, and then are surprised when the people they hired feel misled six months later.
Run an honest process. It is slower in the first conversation and faster in every conversation after.
