your first ten hires

Culture is the first ten people. Everyone after them copies the norm those ten set, and no values page on the wall overrides that. I’ve watched a smaller version of this enough times to call it a law: take one extremely bright, fast, ambitious 21-year-old, put him in a room with five people who are merely fine, and in a year his graph bends down. Not because he got dumber — because the room set the standard, and the standard was “we’ll do something eventually.” Your first ten are that room, permanently.

So hire the average you actually want, not the one that’s easy to reach. This is adverse selection, and it runs through everything — which city you build in, which mentors you take, which friends you drink with. The same person in San Francisco and in a work-life-balance town produces different work; it’s the environment, every time. The good news is that with your own company you get to choose the environment. The bad news is that each early hire moves it, and one wrong one moves it the wrong way for everyone who comes after.

A trap here is the struggle story — “a startup has to be hard, so we’ll earn nothing and suffer for two years.” It burns you out and it keeps the smart people away, because the smart people who aren’t founders join you when there’s money and a real thing, not when there’s a vow of poverty. Zerodha was bootstrapped the whole way and still paid people; the hardship was never the point. Build something good enough that strong people want in, then let them in.

And once they’re in, don’t be the nice guy. You can be kind; you cannot be taken for granted. A cofounder who hasn’t submitted numbers for three weeks while nobody says anything is a norm being set, the same as any other. Everyone who isn’t emotionally invested in the company takes exactly as much as you let them. The first ten learn what’s acceptable by watching what you tolerate. That, not the deck on the wall, is the culture.