Building the initial team for seed stage startups at andrewchen

It’s critical to start with the right set of early customers to kick off all the self-reinforcing growth cycles we’ve discussed above. You have to start by knowing who your best early customers will be — for productivity/collaboration companies that’s often knowledge workers on remote and distributed teams, and often engineers.

Takeaways:

1. Sales becomes the second most common hire , after engineering.


2. A quarter of companies hired a product manager at this point.


3. Recruiters become a surprisingly common hire. I did not expect that. This is particularly true across some of the most unique startups, like Linear, Figma, Ramp, and Coda. Here’s Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear,

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