Founders obsess over their own decisions, their own strategy, their own execution. Adrian Vanzyl thinks they’re often looking in the wrong place for what actually determines a company’s trajectory. After watching dozens of early-stage teams form, he’s noticed something consistent. The first ten hires shape a company’s culture and capability more durably than almost any decision the founders make directly.
This isn’t an argument that founders don’t matter. Instead, it’s a reminder that the earliest hiring decisions carry weight far beyond the roles being filled.
Why Early Hires Set the Cultural Baseline
Culture doesn’t get written down and adopted later. Instead, it gets established by the first people who actually do the work, day after day, before anyone formalizes anything. Consider how the fifth employee handles a mistake. Think about how the eighth employee treats a frustrated customer. Or notice how the third employee responds to disagreement with a founder. These moments become the informal template every future hire absorbs.
This matters because culture is far easier to establish early than to correct later. A company of fifty people with an entrenched bad habit faces a much harder fix than a company of eight catching the same habit before it calcifies. In short, the first ten hires aren’t just filling roles. They’re quietly writing the company’s unwritten rulebook.
The Mistake of Hiring for Skill Alone
Under pressure to move fast, many founders default to hiring purely for technical skill. This makes sense on the surface. A skilled engineer solves problems a mediocre one can’t. However, skill without cultural fit creates a specific, underappreciated risk in a small team. In a team this size, one person’s behavior has an outsized effect on everyone around them.
A brilliant but toxic early hire does more damage in a ten-person company than the same person would in a thousand-person one. After all, there’s no layer of management to absorb the friction, and no critical mass of culture strong enough to dilute a bad influence. Evaluating early hires on both dimensions together, rather than treating skill as a gate and culture as an afterthought, tends to prevent this exact problem.
Why Diversity of Thought Matters More Than It Seems
Early teams often form around similarity. Founders naturally recruit from their own networks. As a result, these networks tend to produce people who think alike, share blind spots, and reinforce each other’s assumptions rather than challenge them. This feels comfortable and moves fast in the short term. It’s also a quiet liability.
A team that agrees too easily misses problems a more varied team would catch. Someone with a different professional background, a different way of approaching risk, or simply a different instinct for what customers actually want can surface issues the founding team never considered. Building that variety in deliberately, rather than defaulting to comfortable similarity, pays off precisely when the company hits its first real unexpected obstacle.
The Underrated Value of the First Skeptic
Most founders want early hires who believe in the mission completely. That instinct is understandable. Still, an early team made up entirely of true believers has a blind spot. Nobody asks the uncomfortable question before a decision gets made, only after it’s already gone wrong.
A thoughtful early skeptic, someone willing to push back respectfully and ask why a plan will actually work, often prevents costly mistakes long before they become visible externally. This isn’t the same as hiring someone negative or difficult. Rather, it’s hiring someone with enough independent judgment to disagree constructively when the situation calls for it.
Why Founders Should Slow Down on These Specific Hires
Every hire matters, but the first ten carry disproportionate weight. This happens precisely because there’s no existing culture to absorb a mistake. A bad hire at employee fifty gets diluted quickly, since forty-nine other people are already setting the tone. By contrast, a bad hire at employee five becomes a fifth of the entire company’s daily behavior and attitude.
This is exactly why rushing these specific hires under growth pressure tends to backfire. The time saved by filling a role quickly is often repaid many times over in the cultural repair work needed later. That repair only becomes necessary once a poor fit has already shaped how the rest of the team operates.
What Adrian Vanzyl Believes This Means for Founders Building Their Early Team
For founders making these first critical hires, the practical takeaway is to treat them with more scrutiny, not less, even when the pressure to move fast feels intense. Evaluate cultural fit and skill together, not sequentially. Deliberately build in perspectives that differ from the founding team’s own. And value a thoughtful skeptic as much as an enthusiastic believer.
That’s the discipline Adrian Vanzyl encourages every founder to apply, well before headcount pressure makes it tempting to skip.
