Today we launch First Hires, an open resource I’ve developed following almost three years of supporting Seedcamp-backed founders as they scale through those critical initial months post their first fundraising round.
Every company’s journey is unique, but after working closely with hundreds of founders, you start to see patterns emerge: the decisions that compound, the mistakes that sting, and the moments that define whether a team builds momentum or stalls. One of the clearest signals of future success is how deliberately a founder approaches their early hires. In those first 12 months, it can feel like the founder’s job is to navigate a hiring minefield. Every decision matters, every mis-hire costs time, capital, and energy.
Making the wrong early hire can set your company back months; make the right one and it can change your trajectory overnight. First Hires isn’t another playbook promising a magic formula because there isn’t one. Instead, it’s designed as a toolkit to reference and adapt as you build your first ten-person team. It’s been developed on the collective experience of the Seedcamp portfolio and the lessons learned from founders who’ve been through it all before.
The resource is structured around three core sections:
1. Foundations — the building blocks that allow you to run hiring processes effectively, from defining your operating cadence to understanding compensation and equity.
2. Hiring the Core Functions — deep dives into the three most common early roles: engineering, go-to-market, and operations, with guidance on what good looks like at each stage.
3. Philosophies — the frameworks that help ensure your first ten hires are not just capable, but exceptional multipliers for your culture and execution.
The aim with First Hires is to reduce the guesswork and give founders confidence in one of the hardest parts of company building. We’ve made it open to all founders, not just those backed by Seedcamp, because we believe that raising the overall bar on early-stage hiring benefits the whole ecosystem.
We’ve also kept the scope intentionally focused. There are countless directions we could have taken this, but early hiring is too nuanced and contextual to be solved by a single framework. First Hires is something to reference, challenge, and build upon with your advisors, investors, and future team members.
For me personally, this project reflects years of learning and lessons from working with our amazing founders at Seedcamp. I continue to believe that the earliest hires you make shape everything that follows — your culture, your pace, your product, and ultimately your company’s ceiling for success.
I hope you find First Hires useful, whether you’re about to hire your first team member or rounding out your first ten. And if you’re a founder actively tackling these challenges right now, I’m opening a limited number of 1:1 talent sessions until the end of the year to go deeper on your specific hiring strategy — feel free to DM me for details.
Written by James Wright, our Head of Talent.