Brainstorm: Early Stage Startup Archetype

Your startup doesn't need a Staff Engineer. It needs a Founding Engineer. Most founders don't understand the difference until it's too late.

I just reviewed a hiring doc for a seed-stage startup. 30-point scorecard. Requirements for “hexagonal architecture” and “CQRS patterns.” Discussion of “engineering rituals” and “technical debt management.”

This is exactly how startups hire their way to failure.

Here's what they were optimizing for: process over speed, scalability over learning, architecture over shipping.

They were hiring for the company they hoped to be in 5 years, not the company they are today.

Pre-PMF, you need builders, not architects. The difference:

Staff Engineer mindset: “Let me design a system that can handle 10x growth.” Founding Engineer mindset: “Let me ship something today and see if anyone cares.”

Staff Engineer: “We need proper CI/CD pipelines before we deploy.” Founding Engineer: “I'll deploy from my laptop and fix it if it breaks.”

Staff Engineer: “This technical debt will haunt us.” Founding Engineer: “This technical debt is buying us learning velocity.”

The cruel irony? The “perfect” senior engineer from a large company will likely fail at your startup. Not because they're bad, but because they're optimized for the wrong game.

You're not scaling a solution. You're searching for one.

Hire accordingly.

Alexandr Wang said it best: hire people who give a s***. That's been top of mind for me lately.

Our team today is 30% former founders, 34% women, and 20% immigrants. Different backgrounds, same trait: they care. They're not passive employees. They take ownership and play offense.

That comes down to agency.

In startups, things break every day. The people who excel don't wait for instructions. They see problems and fix them. They reshape situations outside their control. They push the company forward because they want to.

I look for one thing while hiring: agency. And you can't fake it. It shows up in the story of someone's life. Ask them where they've been, what they've done, what they want next. That tells you more than any polished answer about a “tough problem at work.”

Agency is the filter. Everything else is secondary.

Here's my startup hiring philosophy:

Hire people that would be great founders, but are too risk averse to start their own thing.

The key is giving them free rein to own their area of the business.

Try to control them, and they leave.

Freedom leads to great culture.

These are things we see with the elite teams we work with. Typically, they won't say it outright or need to discover it over time — but if you fit this mold, you might be built for startups.

They won't always say it out loud, but the best startups try to hire future founders.

They want:

• Senior ICs who understand the why behind everything and challenge assumptions.
• Owners who can drive projects from end-to-end with no hand-holding.
• Intense workaholics that don't even ask about work-life balance.
• Missionaries who intrinsically, deeply care about the vision of the company. They negotiate for as much long-term upside as they can.
• Upward trajectory that shows hunger. They're taking on bigger projects and getting promotions at a rapid clip, and now they can take on even more at the startup. No peaks or plateaus.
• Elite credentials but not an entitled attitude. The shiny degree or company doesn't matter as much as the humility to know there's still a lot more to prove and learn.
• Side projects that show genuine passion. One founder said, “He's clearly in it for the love of the game.”
• Hustle in the interview process itself. They proactively go above-and-beyond, beyond the scope of the assigned process. They move quickly because they want THIS job at THIS company, not just any role.
• They're already doing the job. They want it so bad because they'd be doing this anyway even if they didn't get the job. They're actively contributing to open-source repos, offering product feedback or mock designs, and promoting it with their friends or writing tweet threads.
• Strong culture fit over perfect skills match. Founders will always prefer someone raw with good skills but tons of potential and drive over someone with elite skill but is high-ego, rigid, difficult, and annoying to work with.
• Doesn't have the anti-signals. Job-hoppers without progression. Stagnated at a level. Self-promotional in a way that's pumping themselves up. Too much consulting or contracting (guilty).

In the first 5 years of Airwallex, we made a massive hiring mistake.

We brought in people with impressive résumés — ex-bankers, payments veterans, people who had worked on the SWIFT network.

On paper, they looked perfect. In practice, they nearly broke our culture. They had a lot of experience, but they weren't builders. They knew how things used to work, not how things should work.

What we really needed were people who were curious, determined, and optimistic, who believe in the vision. We didn't hire for that early enough — and we paid the price. Morale took a hit. Momentum slowed. It was painful to go through.

The lesson? Hire for belief, grit, and the ability to build — especially early on.

Because in a startup, mindset scales faster than experience. And the wrong hires can cost you more than just time — they can derail your culture.

The single most important heuristic when hiring at a startup (especially first 15–20 people) is answering the question “would you see yourself working for them”. If answer is no, move on.

The reason is that it answers the question of ownership the best. And a team of 15 has not structure, it's flat. It's a team of owners. No one “works for you” in a team of 15.

When hiring at a startup, the most important question isn't about skills. It's: “What do you want in life?” And ideally, they show you in how they've lived.

I used to focus entirely on ability during interviews. Can they code? Can they sell? Can they execute?

But I learned the hard way that skills don't predict success at startups. What predicts success is alignment between what energizes someone and what the role actually requires.

Someone who thrives on clear processes will struggle in an early-stage environment. Someone who needs external validation will burn out when customers reject the first three product iterations. Someone who wants predictable hours will resent the all-hands-on-deck moments that define startups.

None of these preferences are wrong. They're just wrong for us.

Now I spend more time understanding what actually motivates candidates: “What kind of work makes you lose track of time?” “Tell me about a project where you had zero guidance but found a way forward.” “What frustrates you most about your current role?”

I'm not looking for perfect answers. I'm looking for people whose natural wiring matches our reality.

Skills can be developed. Fundamental motivations can't be changed.

Get the incentives right, and everything else becomes easier.

Great companies aren't built by lone geniuses. They're built by people who give a sh*t and show it every day.

Great companies aren't built by 10x-ers. They're built by people who give a sh*t.

The best hires I've made prove this.

They didn't have the flashiest resumes. They didn't have decades of industry experience. They didn't obsess over titles, levels, or credit.

But they cared...deeply.

About the product. About the users. About the team.

And that changed everything.

They stayed late when it mattered. They hopped on calls with customers. They flagged issues before they became problems.

You can't teach that. You can't incentivize it. You can only hire for it.

Here's what I look for now:

• They say “we” more than “I”
• They've shipped scrappy things without being told
• They ask questions that show they've thought 5 steps ahead
• They light up when talking about user pain

Our founding engineer is f*cking cracked.

In two weeks, Ben has shipped: Desktop app, New auth system, Our new background agent service, + 5 more things.

Before Den, he was co-founder at HSC Prep, where he built a tutoring platform from scratch to over 6 figures in ARR. Since six, Ben has been shipping incredible products.

We're lucky to have him.

I've hired 100+ people. The best ones all failed this one traditional interview question.

“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

Their answer? “I have no f*cking clue.”

And that's exactly why I hired them.

Here's what I've learned across Factor_, Highkey, and now MALK:

The ones with rigid 5-year plans are usually the first to crack when reality shifts.

And reality always shifts.

The best people I've hired were comfortable saying: “I don't know where I'll be, but I know I'll figure it out.” “My plan is to stay curious and see what doors open.” “Ask me again in 6 months, it'll probably be different.”

They weren't being flippant. They were being honest.

In startups, the only certainty is uncertainty. The role you're hired for today won't exist in 18 months. The market will shift. The product will pivot. The team will transform.

I need people who thrive in that chaos. Not despite it. Because of it.

Now I ask different questions: “What's something you believed strongly 2 years ago that you've completely changed your mind about?” “Tell me about a time your plan went to shit. What happened next?” “What excites you more: knowing what's next or figuring it out?”

The planners give polished answers. The builders tell messy truths.

Guess which ones help scale companies.

P.S. If you're interviewing somewhere and they dock you for not having a 5-year plan, run. They're optimizing for the wrong thing.

I honestly don't know how founders of remote startups do it.

Working together with our team in the office has got me out of a sticky situation more than once! Take last week for example...

I often take customer calls out-loud where our product team can overhear.

Last week, as a customer was sharing their screen, they clicked an important link in our product and it loaded in the same tab, disrupting their workflow...

I heard their groan as they instinctively clicked the 'back' button, and cringed internally as we waited in silence for it load.

Our Head of Product, sitting just across the room from me, had heard it too.

It clearly wasn't the first time this had happened to them...

The customer made a passing comment about how it's such a pain in the ass when that happens. I could totally relate.

A few minutes later, just as I was about to wrap up the call, I got a slack message. It was from our Head of Product.

He had shipped an update to fix the problem while we talked.

I told the customer to refresh the page and click the same link again.

It loaded in a new tab and we listened to his jaw drop!

One of the biggest blind spots I see in startups is assuming early-stage hires will scale with the business indefinitely. Some do. Most don't. And that's okay.

The person who thrives in a 5-person team often brings adaptability, speed, and broad execution muscle. But by the time you hit 50+ headcount, you need depth, structure, and the ability to manage complexity.

Build for the stage you're at, and reassess at every one that follows.