How to Hire Your First Developers as a Startup
Hire for range and judgment rather than specialization, since early work changes shape constantly. Evaluate with a work sample resembling the real job rather than credentials. And settle equity terms precisely at the offer, because unclear vesting and repurchase terms are what turn a good early hire into a dispute two years later.
What early hires actually need to be
The instinct is to hire for the current problem: a backend person because the backend needs work, a frontend person because the interface is rough.
That is right at a certain size and wrong at the beginning, because the current problem is going to change. Early companies pivot, discover the real customer, and rewrite assumptions. A specialist hired precisely into last quarter's shape becomes a mismatch through no fault of their own, which is an unpleasant outcome for everyone and an avoidable one.
What holds up is range and judgment. Someone who can move between parts of the system, pick up an unfamiliar area, and make a reasonable call without a specification. Depth in one area is valuable and it is the second criterion rather than the first.
The other property worth screening for explicitly is comfort with ambiguity. Early work involves being asked for things nobody has fully thought through, and the difference between an engineer who surfaces the missing decision and one who builds the literal request is enormous at this stage, in both directions.
The first hire sets the bar
Whoever you hire first becomes the reference point for the next several: they interview candidates, define what good looks like in review, and attract or repel people through their own network. Hiring someone adequate under time pressure is not a neutral decision, because raising a standard afterwards is much harder than setting it once.
Evaluating without in-house technical depth
If no founder can assess technical work, that gap is the first thing to close, and the answer is to borrow judgment rather than to substitute process for it.
A trusted technical advisor sitting in on one interview, or reviewing a work sample, costs very little relative to a first engineering hire that does not work out. Most experienced engineers will do this for a founder they like, and being asked is usually taken as a compliment.
Beyond that, three things work regardless of your own depth.
A work sample resembling the real job. Not a puzzle. Ask them to review a change and explain the risks, debug something failing, or extend an unfamiliar module. You can learn a great deal from how someone narrates that work even without being able to write it yourself.
Specific probing on past decisions. What were the alternatives, why this approach, what went wrong afterwards. People who did the work answer fluently and people who were adjacent to it do not, and you do not need technical depth to hear that difference.
Verifiable evidence. Public contributions, published writing, references you actually call and who describe concrete work. This is the cheapest risk reduction available and it is routinely skipped in favor of another conversation.
The offer, and the terms that cause trouble later
Compensation conversations at this stage focus on salary and a percentage, and the percentage is the part that generates disputes years afterwards, because it is usually discussed loosely and documented late.
Be precise at the offer. A percentage is meaningless without the share count and the fully diluted total. State the vesting schedule and the cliff. Say whether there is any repurchase right over vested shares, and if so at what price, since that single term decides whether the equity survives a departure. Name the post-termination exercise window, because a short one can make vested options unusable for someone without cash available.
Then document it before the person starts. Equity mentioned in an offer conversation and never granted is one of the most common problems found during diligence, and it is entirely avoidable.
On the employment structure itself, be deliberate rather than defaulting to whatever is convenient. Contractor arrangements that look like employment carry real classification risk in many jurisdictions, and intellectual property assignment needs to be explicit rather than assumed, particularly with contractors and particularly for anything that becomes core to the product.
This is general information rather than legal advice, and both equity structure and employment classification vary by jurisdiction. Both are worth a lawyer's review before the first offer rather than after the tenth.
Where early hires actually come from
Early technical hires rarely arrive through job boards alone, and understanding why is useful.
The people you most want are usually employed, not looking, and reachable mainly through someone they trust. That makes your network and your visible work the main channels: what you have written, what you have built in public, and who is willing to make an introduction.
That also means the pitch is different. A strong engineer choosing a startup is deciding about the problem, the people, the ownership, and whether the company will exist in two years. Salary matters and it is rarely the deciding factor at this stage, so a pitch built entirely on compensation attracts people optimizing for something you probably cannot win on.
And when you do meet someone unknown to your network, verification becomes the bottleneck: you are deciding about a stranger with limited evidence, and the cost of being wrong on an early hire is disproportionate.
HireOnChain is a job board for AI and onchain work built around records that can be confirmed rather than claimed, which is precisely the part of an early hiring decision that founders are least equipped to resolve on their own.
Frequently asked questions
- What should a startup look for in its first developers?
- Range and judgment before specialization, because early work changes shape and a specialist hired into last quarter's problem becomes a mismatch through no fault of their own. Also screen explicitly for comfort with ambiguity, since the difference between someone who surfaces a missing decision and someone who builds the literal request is large.
- How do I evaluate developers if I am not technical?
- Borrow judgment rather than replacing it with process. A trusted technical advisor in one interview costs little against a bad first hire. Then use a work sample resembling the real job, probe specifics on past decisions, and actually check public work and references, all of which you can assess without writing code yourself.
- What equity terms should be settled at the offer?
- The share count and fully diluted total rather than only a percentage, the vesting schedule and cliff, whether any repurchase right covers vested shares and at what price, and the post-termination exercise window. Document all of it before the person starts, since equity promised in conversation and never granted is a common diligence problem.
- Where do early technical hires come from?
- Mostly networks and visible work rather than job boards alone, because the people you want are usually employed and not looking. That also changes the pitch: strong engineers choose early companies on the problem, the people, and the ownership, so an offer built mainly on compensation attracts candidates you cannot win on price.