Your first five hires set the bar for the next fifty.
At seed you are hiring people who will join on conviction rather than on comp, brand or job security. That is a narrow filter, and it is why the first engineering hires take longer than founders plan for.
What actually makes hiring hard here.
Nobody has heard of you, you cannot outbid anyone, and the people you want are in good seats at companies with real products. What you have instead is scope, equity and the founders themselves — and those only work if you get in front of the right person and someone credible makes the case. Job posts are close to useless at this stage: they reach people who are actively looking, and the engineer who would be your best hire is not.
Who to hire, and in what order.
Someone who has built from zero before and will not freeze without a spec. Breadth over depth — they will touch infrastructure, product and whatever breaks. Getting this one right is worth more than the next three combined.
Whatever your product genuinely depends on: ML, perception, infrastructure, security. Hire this late enough that you know it matters and early enough that a non-specialist has not built something you have to unpick.
Deliberately not a clone of the first. The most common seed-stage mistake is hiring three versions of the same engineer and discovering nobody owns the parts they all avoid.
Hiring for a title you cannot yet support
A VP Engineering with nobody to manage will leave within a year, and you will have paid a premium for the privilege. At seed you need builders. Hire the leader when there is something to lead — usually somewhere between eight and fifteen engineers.
Frequently asked questions
Reach and pitch, in that order. The engineers you want are employed and not applying anywhere — across 100Networks placements, 72% of the people we hired were not looking when found — so someone has to approach them directly. Then the pitch has to be about scope and the problem rather than compensation, because you cannot win on compensation. Founders should take every first conversation themselves at this stage; a strong engineer joins a person and a problem, not a logo they have never heard of.
Enough that compensation is not the reason they say no, and not so much that you cannot hire the next three. In India, a strong senior engineer at a funded startup commonly commands ₹28–48 LPA, plus equity that is meaningful rather than symbolic — 0.5–2% for a genuine founding engineer is a common band. Be specific about the strike price, the preference stack and the last valuation. Vagueness about equity reads as evasion and costs you candidates.
For the first one or two hires, usually not — founders are the best recruiters they have, and the conversations are the job. It starts to make sense when you need someone specific and cannot reach them, when you are hiring in a market you do not know, or when founder time spent sourcing is costing more than the fee. A success fee paid only on joining means the downside is bounded.
Six to twelve weeks is realistic, and longer than most founders plan for. The search is not the slow part; convincing someone with a safe job to take a risk on an unknown company is. Add 30–90 days of notice period in India before they actually start.
Make hiring the thing you’re good at.
Seed, Series A to D, or enterprise — send us one hard role. We'll match it the same day, and you'll meet a shortlist in days. Pay only when they join.