At ten people, culture is not a document.
It is the behaviour of the ten.
For founders making their first hires, where each hire is a large fraction of the whole company. This playbook is who to hire, in what order, and how not to undo the company while doing it.
// 33 PAGES · FIVE PARTS · THREE CHECKLISTS · FREE
Seven things to know about early hiring.
Each is a mechanism you can plan around, and the guide is plain about the limit.
Each hire is a large fraction of the whole
At ten people, one person is ten percent of your company's behaviour, standards and atmosphere. There is no surrounding mass to absorb a poor fit, no established norm strong enough to correct someone, and nowhere for a difficult person to be quietly routed.
They set the bar by who they attract and tolerate
Your early hires will interview candidates, refer former colleagues and demonstrate daily what standard of work passes. Excellent people generally recommend excellent people and are uncomfortable when standards slip; mediocre hires tend to recommend people like themselves and are relieved when the bar is low.
A weak hire costs far more than the salary
The salary is the smallest component. The real cost is the founder attention consumed managing the situation, the work that must be redone, the effect on the strong people who notice and quietly recalibrate, the months lost before you accept what you already knew, and the disruption of unwinding it.
The order determines what the company can do
The sequence of the first ten roles is a strategy decision disguised as a staffing one. Hiring a second engineer when the constraint is that nobody can sell buys you capability you cannot use.
They are the first real test of whether you can delegate
Every founder says they want to hire senior people who take things off their plate. Rather fewer actually let go once someone arrives — they keep the decisions, review the work, and rebuild what was delivered.
They are the origin of your employer story
Whatever your first ten say about working with you — publicly, privately, to their networks — becomes your reputation as an employer, and reputation at this size is entirely word of mouth.
And now the honest limit
You will get one of the first ten wrong. Nobody's process is good enough at this sample size, with this little information, under this much time pressure, to avoid it entirely.
Five parts, and a last page.
Parts one to five are the thinking and the doing, worth your time even if you never touch a piece of software. The last pages show how to carry the process.
Why the first ten decide the next hundred
Decide before you open a role
Run a process that predicts
After the yes
The checklists and the mistakes
Do it all in one place
Nine mistakes, all of them avoidable.
None is about picking the wrong person. They are failures of process, which is good news, because process can be set up in advance.
Hiring the wish rather than the constraint
A team assembled from a year of individually reasonable ambitions, none of which was the actual bottleneck at the moment it was hired.
Not writing the ninety-day outcome
Without it there is no shared expectation, no basis for onboarding and no honest first review — just a growing sense that it is not working.
Hiring on interviews alone
Conversations mostly measure how much you enjoyed them. A short paid work sample predicts the next year far better and takes less of everyone's time than a fourth round.
Lowering the bar after meeting someone likeable
Your standard will move under time pressure and social warmth. Writing it down beforehand is the only reliable defence.
Hiring on ambiguity
A hire you are unsure about is a hire you will be unsure about for a year. Unsure means no.
Moving slowly
Speed is one of the few advantages a small company has, and a six-week process loses precisely the candidates it was designed to evaluate.
Overselling the opportunity
It filters out nobody useful and guarantees a disappointment in month two. Honesty about the risk increases commitment from the people who join anyway.
Neglecting the first two weeks
The empty seat is filled, so attention moves on — while the new person is deciding whether they made a mistake.
Waiting when it is not working
Delay is not kindness. It costs the person their alternatives, the team their confidence, and you the attention you did not have.
Thirty-three pages.
Yours in one click.
Five parts, three checklists and the nine mistakes. One email with the link, no drip sequence, and we do not sell the list.