Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

Low ego, More passion and drive, hustling mindset, Generalists, Good judgement. Simple thing i would do is Ask lot of "Whys"

Why you did this?, why this way? , why you joined this company?

This gives good understanding of both Personality and Hard skills.

People who make (mostly good) decisions and ship stuff as quickly as possible. Ideally while being nice people to work with.

Your first hires need to be people who make the company faster, not slower. A single bad hire can sink the ship. Someone who is great in a large corporation can ruin an early start-up.

Personally, I'm hoping for low-ego high achievers. But that's up to you. This is where you get to define what the company culture will be.

Specifically what i used to check, whether candidate also motivated with mission that I have. If its not motivate them then there is a cultural fit problem and might not good fit for early days.

"Get shit done" is by far the most important attribute of your first few employees. You need people who can work independently without a lot of direction, and focus on the right things while the rest of the world burns around them.

They don't need fancy credentials or to be super smart or have a great internet presence; what you should look for is a track-record of shipping, and evidence of independent work; and when you interview them, find out if they have good judgement, if they have a sense of when to trade off perfect for good enough, if they're able to diagnose and fix things when they're broken.

As you grow, you can add more traditional engineers to build a more conventional, well-rounded team. But most companies don't get to 20 employees if their first 5-10 aren't able to work quickly & make good decisions without getting side-tracked on all the myriad little distractions of designing the perfect framework for the framework, office politics, dev environment isn't quite right, etc, etc.

I think this is where you’ll define the company culture. Maybe in the first 10, but certainly in the first 100. If you want to design the corporate culture, this is where it starts.

Worth noting that the 'just ship it' advice works differently depending on market type. B2B with long sales cycles needs different validation than consumer apps. The data from failed B2B launches is usually insufficient for product decisions.

Do not exceed token budget.

Their expendability in getting the first few dungeons over with so I can farm enough starter gear to outfit my actual long-term party with.

Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application:

A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed.

As I said before at least 2 of the following:

1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open with core maintainers). No hello world / demo projects.

2. Production-grade shipped projects / side-projects with paying customers or high-profile companies using it and is bringing in recurring revenue.

3. Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.

All are extremely difficult to fake and easy to verify and requires a level of effort on the applicant to qualify which filters 90% of noise out there. Years of experience is not a requirement but a bonus.

The rest of the other methods like leetcode, hackerrank, take home projects or quiz trivia, wastes time on both the interviewer and the candidate and both can be cheated easily using AI.

It is that simple.