Assembling your founding team: who do you need by your side and why?

In the VC ecosystem, we often applaud and emphasize groundbreaking technology as the key to a company’s success. While undoubtedly necessary, a product's flashiness can distract us from the key to its potential adoption: execution. Ultimately, execution falls on the team, and at no stage is assembling a strong team to execute more critical than at a company’s inception. A well-rounded and cohesive group can turn an innovative idea into a thriving business, and a poorly constructed one can doom even the most compelling vision.

Based on insights from my experience at MVL, we’ll explore the key components and strategies for building your founding team, which we define as your first one to five hires.

Who do you need on your team?

A “Grindset” culture is commonplace at startups. Advisors counsel founders that the only way to succeed is to roll up their sleeves and work long hours. There’s no way to sugarcoat it; starting a company involves a lot of responsibility and, inevitably, elbow grease. However, the best method for supercharging productivity isn’t putting in more time; it’s hiring well, especially in the areas that come less naturally for the founder and are critical for hitting key organizational milestones, such as customer adoption and product development. Onboarding new employees allows founders to refocus on what they do well and delegate in other areas where they work more slowly and or less successfully. As a result, a personal assessment of where a founder is strong and experienced and where they lack expertise leads them to who they should prioritize hiring and why. The aim is to hire complementary co-founders who bring different skills and approaches but with whom founders can collaborate well.

Be warned: founders may struggle to hire well in areas where they have less familiarity. They often lack pattern recognition and the expertise to understand what good looks like in these domains. For example, if they’re engineering experts, their hiring bar for engineers is incredibly high. However, it can be surprisingly low in other areas, such as sales, marketing, and people operations. Under pressure and stress to hire quickly, founders may find their lack of familiarity in certain areas amplified, increasing the likelihood of making a poor hiring decision.

To counteract this tendency, we recommend relying on advisors and outside experts to craft a job description that reflects the necessary skills and qualifications for the new hire. (See “Unlock Potential by Moving Beyond Years of Experience” for our thoughts on how to write strong job descriptions.) These people are usually willing to help interview candidates and give insight into their fit for the company's needs, too. 

Typically, at MVL, we build enterprise AI companies and advise our founders to construct teams with the following roles:

• Founder/CEO: The visionary leader who drives the company forward and leads customer development, investor relations, and early product work. In addition to these responsibilities, the CEO executes founder-led sales. That’s because, at this point in a company’s lifecycle, onboarding a GTM expert can be premature as the team is still working through identifying product-market fit and not ready for scale. CEOs can come from all types of functional backgrounds, but regardless of whether they were previously in engineering, product, sales, or another position, their professional and personal experience should give them a competitive advantage to start a company in their target space.
• Head of Engineering: The technical leader responsible for product development and building the technical team.
• Full-Stack Engineer: A versatile engineer handling front-end and back-end tasks. Rather than a specialist, this engineer is a “multi-tool athlete,” a generalist engineer who is excited about rolling up their sleeves, learning new technologies, and willing to navigate the inevitable strategic pivots in the product direction.
• Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Scientist, Data Scientist, or Data Engineer: This specialist will handle the data-driven aspects of the technology development.
• Designer: A creative professional who ensures the product is user-friendly and visually appealing.
  

These roles are crucial because they lay the foundation for achieving key milestones, especially in the pre-seed or seed stage. Of course, they can change based on the founder's background, the company's domain, and the company's runway.

How do you find your team?

It’s one thing to figure out who, from a functional perspective, needs to be on a founding team. It’s another to convince people with those skills to join. Hiring for a startup comes with unique challenges. At this stage, there is no dedicated talent team (unless you work with a venture studio, of course, 😉), abundant cash, or a well-known brand to attract candidates. On top of these factors, the demands, lack of structure, and ambiguity inherent in entrepreneurship are not for everyone.

Here’s how a founder can navigate these obstacles to source the right people:

• Start with referrals: Leverage existing connections and connections from close networks, including employees, investors, angels, and advisors, who can lead to high-quality candidates. While convenient, depending exclusively on personal recommendations, over-indexing on referrals can lead to diversity debt.
• Conduct outbound sourcing: Seek out potential candidates through LinkedIn, professional networks, recruitment agencies, and events. Ask, “Which communities would attract high-potential startup candidates?” and prioritize showing up in those spaces.
• Inbound applications: Promote open roles on job boards, the company website, and social media to attract candidates already interested in your mission. This strategy can lead to a high volume of prospective candidates, though sifting through the applications to identify the best fits for open roles can be time-consuming.

Remember: founders are their brands. Unlike big companies, startups don’t have widespread name brands to attract talent. Passion and vision will be pivotal in recruiting the right people to join. At an early-stage startup, the product and strategy will pivot over time, but hopefully, the leadership team will remain constant in the company’s infancy. Because of this, founders need to drive this process early in a company’s lifecycle and sell talent on the opportunity to work alongside them.

How do you evaluate potential teammates and convince them to join you?

Evaluating potential teammates goes beyond assessing their baseline qualifications. Ensuring alignment with the company’s vision, mission, and values is crucial. Here are some key aspects to consider:

• Cultural fit: Does the candidate share the company's core values and believe in its mission?
• Skill and aptitude: Can the candidate perform the required tasks and adapt to new challenges?
• Team dynamics: How well will the candidate integrate with the existing team?
• Timing: Is now a good time for this person to make a career transition to a startup?

This evaluation is more straightforward said than done. Common pitfalls can derail even the most thorough recruitment process. At startups, these pitfalls most often are a lack of alignment among the hiring team on what a “good candidate” looks like, relying too much on patterns (e.g., “this person went to Harvard; they must have strong problem-solving capabilities”) rather than assessing actual skills, and failing to provide a good candidate experience. Conducting a rigorous kickoff meeting to agree on the job description and continuing to meet at least weekly as a hiring team can prevent miscommunications and misguided decisions.

During the interview process, ask questions that reveal the candidate’s skills and alignment with your company’s values and goals. Here are some of my go-to questions:

• Tell me your story: This allows founders to learn more about a candidate’s background and gauge a candidate’s communication skills.
• Tell me about a time that challenged you. In retrospect, what would you have done differently and why? Does the candidate have a solution-oriented mindset? How do they approach challenges? Do they learn from their mistakes and express humility?
• We are currently experiencing XYZ problem. How would you approach this situation? This question can help founders understand a candidate’s problem-solving process and signal how prepared a candidate is to contribute to the company on day one.
• What’s the most exciting thing you learned last year about the domain the company operates in? How intellectually curious is the candidate, and how much understanding and excitement do they have about the problem the company aims to solve?
• Why us? This can demonstrate how much research a candidate has done before the conversation and how they see themselves contributing to the company's goals and culture. Be advised that it’s best to ask this question after a few conversations for candidates whom founders source through outbound methods.
• What questions do you have about the company? Cliché but true: it’s an oversight and a missed opportunity for candidates to ask no questions. Unless they’re onboard and operating in the role, they should have at least one thoughtful question about the position or company. If not, they may not be engaged or interested.
• Is there anything else I should know about you? This question is a good catch-all at the end of interviews for the candidate to share anything about their background, priorities, and timing that they may not have had the opportunity to previously.

First screening calls can be particularly overwhelming, and founders often don’t have time to work through every question on their list before deciding whether to advance a candidate to the next phase of their process. To combat these pressures and ensure an interviewee is minimally qualified for a role, we advise founders to focus on a few “quick cut” questions during their first interaction with someone. Quick cuts are the two to three most important questions they need signal on before moving forward. These will vary depending on the type of role and the founder's priorities; we recommend aligning on these questions as a hiring team during a kickoff process.

In addition to adequately vetting candidates through interviews, conducting reference checks is crucial for gaining insights into past performance and work ethic. Founders can learn a lot by asking thoughtful queries and actively listening to candidates during the interview process. But ultimately, interviews are a one-sided story. References allow founders to gain perspectives from people who have been in the trenches with the person they want to make an offer to. Include both backchannel and formal references. (Check out “Hooked on Fear of Reference Checks” by the Madrona team for more information on how to run a reference check effectively.)

Conclusion

Building a founding team for a startup is challenging and highly consequential but also deeply rewarding. The process requires a deep understanding of the company’s specific needs and strategic vision, as well as the ability to leverage existing networks to find and attract the right talent. Careful evaluation of potential teammates—considering their skills, alignment with the mission, and commitment—ensures that the company is capable of driving its vision toward success.
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While time-intensive, investing in thorough assessments and fostering a positive, collaborative culture sets the foundation for a resilient and innovative company culture. This initial effort enhances the chances of achieving startup goals and creates a supportive environment where team members are motivated and aligned with the vision. In the end, onboarding the right people can transform the challenge of starting a business into an exhilarating journey of shared success and growth.

To learn more about MVL, read our manifesto and let’s build a company together.