Discuss: How should you pick your startup’s first employees?

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Your early-stage startup has an amazing founding team, but work is starting to pile up. So, you’re wondering whether you should be hiring your first employees. But if you do start the search now, you have no idea what kind of people you should look for.

Hiring the first employees is always a challenge for most—if not all—founders. So, we asked some founders from the community to share their experience, the lessons they learned, and some tips.

Editor’s note: Answers have been edited for clarity.

Jianggan Li, founder at Momentum Works

Hiring too early may be unnecessarily costly and leave good people with not enough work to do. Hiring too late may cripple the company’s growth and cause it to miss opportunities.

I think there are three conditions founders need to meet before hiring their first employee:

1. You have enough work for the person to do for at least the next three to six months.
2. Having this person will free you up for more value-adding stuff.
3. You can afford to give the person a salary that can pay the bills.

That said, a company should start looking for good people as soon as it is founded.

Finding the right talent takes time. You don’t want to run into a situation where you desperately need someone immediately but have no one in the pipeline. We’ve been there and we have advised some of our partners out of such a situation. Trust me—it is not a nice feeling.

What to look for

Let’s discuss: