Raised pre-seed funding? Your first instinct might be to hire managers. Don’t. Hire builders. Founding engineers. People who can turn an idea into a product. At this stage, you’re not scaling a business. You’re proving one. The fastest route to your next funding round isn’t more hierarchy. It’s shipping. Structure comes later. Execution comes first. Building your first technical team? Get in touch with our team to hire the builders who’ll turn your vision into reality. #FoundingEngineers #EngineeringLeadership #TechHiring #SoftwareEngineering #TechRecruitment #StartupHiring #BuildingTeams #TechTalent

A generalized story from our work — details anonymized, pattern very real. A seed-stage SaaS founder came to us needing three hires in six weeks: a founding engineer, a first growth lead, and an ops generalist. Two earlier recruiters had sent large batches of corporate profiles; every strong candidate ghosted the moment they heard "pre-Series-A." We reset the approach. First, we reframed the pitch — not "small company, limited cash," but "shape the product, own a function, real equity, first-mover upside." Then we went narrow: a handful of operators each, hand-picked for zero-to-one instinct, not headline logos. The founding engineer signed in eleven days, choosing the role over a higher cash offer because of ownership and equity. The growth lead came from a scrappier startup, not a brand-name one, and started shipping experiments in week one. The ops hire turned out to be the quiet MVP — the generalist who held everything together while the founders raised their next round. Three seats. Six weeks. No 40-CV dumps. Just the right few. That's the whole model. #StartupHiring #CaseStudy #EarlyStageTalent

Early bird gets the worm Second mouse gets the cheese... Companies move fast on hiring. It feels proactive. You're slow? Hire faster. You're undersized? Add headcount. You're losing velocity? Recruit aggressively. It's the early bird strategy—move first, move decisively, don't get left behind. Except staffing is the mousetrap. The early bird hires six engineers and triggers the trap: broken onboarding, chaotic deployments, senior engineers spending half their time unblocking juniors. You've scaled the dysfunction. The second mouse waits. They spend a month fixing CI/CD. They rebuild onboarding. They untangle the architecture debt. Then they hire. When they bring people in, the systems are ready. New hires are productive in 3 weeks instead of 8. Deployment is automated, not a ceremonial gate. They compound velocity instead of spreading chaos. Early bird team: Hired 12 people, shipped incrementally more, burned cash. Second mouse team: Fixed systems, hired 4 people, shipped significantly more, preserved runway.

Michael Meo's Build Momentum is a leading business growth organisation focusing on supporting business with fractional placements - everything about fractional placements, makes perfect sense! In Europe I see a lot of posts from people talking about ageism - start talking about Fractional Work, and the picture may change dramatically!

I've seen companies collapse faster after hiring executives than before. Strong product. Real traction. Full C-suite brought in. Six months later: Revenue flatlined. Execution dead. Meetings every hour. What broke it: Nobody owned outcomes. Because it wasn't their money. Hiring executives isn't absolution. It's a multiplier, in both directions. Vet for ownership psychology. Not credentials.

I find it fascinating how each cycle in tech transforms how companies operate, and a new playbook for companies in different stages is developed. With that in mind, we have been testing something new: a Fractional Head of Talent solution for early-stage companies, combining the benefits of in-house and external hiring support. Here's the problem it solves. Founders building deep tech companies are often forced to choose between two bad options: spend hours a week on recruiting themselves (time they don't have), or hire a full-time Head of Talent/Recruiter way too early (cost they can't justify yet). Our fractional model gives founders and core teams: 🔹 Full administrative & operational hiring support — without founders losing focus on the product 🔹 Hiring in sprints — 3-5 critical roles filled over ~2 months, then a pause before the next wave 🔹 Access to real expertise across very different hiring needs — from leadership to deeply technical, hard-to-source roles It's essentially "on-demand talent leadership" — scaled to how early-stage companies actually grow: in bursts, not linearly.

🏔️ Base Camp - The Founder Briefing ft. P E O P L E That Chief of Something title you're about to hand your fifth hire could quietly cost you your best future one... At ten people the C-suite badges feel harmless, generous even. You want to reward the people who took the leap early and a big title costs you nothing today. Give someone Chief Product Officer at employee number five and you've capped who you can hire above them later, and the genuinely senior operator you'll want at forty people won't come in under a title that was handed out for loyalty rather than scope. Use Director as your middle ground and keep the real C-suite seats open. If someone needs a bigger badge for how they show up externally, give them a brand-facing one and keep the internal structure honest. The harder truth sitting underneath it, most of your first hires will be outgrown, and that isn't a failure of theirs or yours. The first five engineers rarely become the CTO running fifty people, it's a completely different job. So name it early, that this is a high-growth chapter and not a job for life, and you save everyone the quiet resentment later. Backed people, honest framing, room to grow into or out of. #Founders #StartupLife #Bootstrapping #ScalingUp #FractionalCOO #Hiring #StartupCulture

“𝐆𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬, 𝐰𝐞’𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞.” That is Mark Zuckerberg, in an internal memo that made it to Reuters. After laying off roughly 8,000 people and moving another 7,000 into new AI roles, he did something relatively rare for a tech CEO: admitted, rather publicly, that the transformation did not go as planned. What I find more interesting than the admission is the framing behind it. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐬, 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝, 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐛𝐲 𝐛𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐲 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 that were supposed to justify the spend. In other words, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐝. I suspect that is a more common story than most organisations would care to admit publicly. In Enterprise Design terms, this is what happens when Architecture and Capability are treated as consequences of a technology decision rather than prerequisites for one. You restructure the organisation around a capability that does not yet exist at the scale you assumed. The human architecture changes first. The results follow later, if at all. To his credit, Zuckerberg did not pretend to have a clear roadmap. “I don’t think anyone does,” he told employees in April. That kind of honesty is actually more useful than false confidence, even if it comes after the disruption rather than before it. What does your organisation do when transformation moves faster than the capability to absorb it? ————- I am a senior Enterprise Designer specialising in change and transformation. I write regularly about the world through an Enterprise Design lens, because how enterprises are structured, led and changed matters more than most people realise. If this resonates, follow me for more, or if you prefer, I would love to connect. #EnterpriseDesign #Transformation #ChangeManagement #OrganisationalDesign #Leadership

We constantly see a disconnect between how employees and owners view compensation, so we built the VisionLink Predictor to illuminate the blind spots of your compensation strategy FOR FREE. VisionLink restores confidence by transforming how you view compensation: shifting it from an expense to be managed into a strategic asset everyone understands. We help organizations measure, align, and optimize compensation through trusted advisors, intelligent software, and a proven system. Complete a quick assessment to unlock your report and see how your leadership compensation strategy is impacting performance, talent retention and enterprise value growth at the link in comments: https://lnkd.in/ehi2tMRc

Congratulations! You closed your Series A. Now comes the difficult part. Building the team that delivers the growth investors expect. Founders suddenly need to hire: • Software Engineers • Product Managers • Customer Success • Sales • Marketing • Operations All at the same time. Hiring quickly doesn't mean lowering the bar. It means having the right recruiting process and enough bandwidth to keep every role moving. The companies that hire well after funding often gain an advantage that lasts for years. #SeriesA #StartupHiring #ScaleUp #Hiring #Talent