Hiring Priorities for Venture Backed Companies: What to Build First

A venture backed company hires against a clock. The funding covers a defined period, the milestones are agreed, and every appointment either moves the business toward the next round or consumes runway that will not be replaced. That pressure produces a specific and recognisable failure: hiring in the order that feels urgent rather than the order that compounds.

This page sets out which priorities are worth funding first, which are commonly funded too early, and why businesses operating in regulated markets such as financial services and insurance face a version of the problem that generic startup hiring advice does not address.

Which hiring priorities should be funded first?

Whichever one is currently being absorbed by a founder, because that is the constraint on everything else.

The reliable diagnostic is not a framework. It is asking which work a founder is personally doing that somebody else could do, and which work only they can do. Everything in the first category is a candidate for the next hire, ranked by how much founder time it consumes.

This produces a different order from the conventional one. Most early plans prioritise revenue generating roles, which is intuitive and frequently wrong, because a founder spending three days a week on recruitment, contracts and compliance is not selling either. The hire that releases the most founder capacity is usually worth more than the hire that carries the most obvious revenue number. Whichever role comes first, diagnose why it will be hard to fill before sourcing starts, a discipline set out in our note on the recruitment practices shaping 2026.

What gets funded too early?

Senior leadership above the work that exists, and specialists hired before anyone can direct them.

• A senior leader hired to build a team that has not been funded, who spends a year doing individual contributor work they are overqualified for and leaves.

• A specialist hired before the organisation knows what it wants from the function, who produces good work nobody acts on.

• A people function stood up before there are enough people for it to serve, which produces process the business is not yet large enough to need.

The common error in all three is hiring for the organisation the company intends to become rather than the one that exists. The intention is sound and the timing is wrong, and the cost is not only the salary. A senior person who spends a year underemployed leaves with a poor impression that reaches their network, and in specialist markets that network is small.

What is different about regulated sector businesses?

Some capability cannot be deferred, because the obligation arrives with the licence rather than with scale.

This is where general startup hiring advice breaks down. The usual guidance is to defer everything that is not immediately commercial, and that guidance is sound until the business needs a licence. A company operating in financial services, insurance or payments acquires obligations at a point determined by its regulator rather than by its headcount, and some of those obligations require named, qualified individuals.

Founders in these sectors routinely discover this late, usually during a funding round or a licence application, and then hire under time pressure into a market that is small and well paid. The capability they need at that moment is not a generalist operations hire. It is somebody who has held the relevant responsibility before, and those people are employed.

The correction is to establish early which obligations attach at which point, and to treat the first of them as a funded hire on the plan rather than a problem for later. It is the one category where hiring ahead of apparent need is the cheaper decision.

How should equity be used in the offer?

As a real component explained properly, or not leaned on at all.

Equity is the lever venture backed companies have and cash rich competitors do not, and it is regularly wasted through poor explanation. A candidate offered a percentage with no context cannot value it, and a candidate who cannot value something discounts it to nearly zero.

What makes the difference is information: the number of shares rather than only a percentage, the current valuation basis, the vesting schedule, what happens on leaving, and an honest word about dilution in future rounds. Candidates who receive that take the equity seriously. Candidates who receive a percentage and enthusiasm negotiate on salary instead, which costs runway the equity was supposed to protect.

The related discipline is not overselling. A candidate who joins believing the outcome is close to certain, and watches a flat round, feels misled even where nobody lied. Stating the range of outcomes plainly recruits people who can live with the risk, which is the population worth having.

Does speed or fit matter more at this stage?

Speed on the roles that are reversible, fit on the ones that are not.

The choice is usually framed as a principle, and it is better treated as a classification. Some hires can be corrected within a quarter at modest cost. Others shape the team that follows them, because they will hire people, set standards and define how the function works long after they have gone.

For the first group, move quickly. A protracted process for a role that is straightforward to correct wastes runway and loses candidates to companies that decided faster. For the second, the cost of a wrong appointment is not the salary but everything built on top of it, and an extra fortnight is cheap against that.

The practical test is to ask what would still be true in a year if this hire did not work out. If the honest answer is not much, hire fast. If the answer includes people they recruited or decisions the business is now committed to, slow down and accept the cost of doing so.

How do you hire senior people into an unfinished organisation?

By being specific about what does not exist yet, and testing whether the candidate is energised or alarmed by it.

Senior candidates from established businesses frequently underestimate how much infrastructure they have been relying on. They arrive expecting data to be available, process to exist and support functions to respond, and the absence of those is not a detail. It is most of the job.

The screening question that works is simply to describe the current state honestly, including the parts that are embarrassing, and watch the reaction. Candidates who start asking what they would build are the right ones. Candidates who ask who will be doing it for them have answered the question just as clearly, and no amount of enthusiasm about the mission changes that. Keeping them once hired is a separate discipline, covered in our piece on retaining senior specialists.