Hiring and Team
Team covers who you build the company with and on what terms: co-founder splits, equity and vesting, the first hires, and the structures that hold when things get hard. These are the decisions that are cheapest to make carefully and most expensive to unwind, and they are made early, when the company feels too small for any of it to matter. The concepts here cover the arrangements and the vocabulary you are expected to know before you agree to them.
7 concepts in Hiring and Team
- Founder-Market FitThe match between a founding team's specific unfair advantage (domain expertise, lived experience of the problem, or an unusual network) and the market they are building for.
- Co-Founder Equity SplitHow ownership of the company is divided among the founding team at the outset. A decision made with the least information a company will ever have about who contributes what.
- Vesting and the CliffVesting is earning equity gradually over time by staying with the company; the cliff is the initial period, usually one year, during which none of it vests, so someone who leaves early walks away with nothing.
- First Ten HiresThe small set of employees hired before the company has real process, whose individual judgment substitutes for the systems a larger company would use to catch their mistakes.
- Vesting Acceleration (Single vs. Double Trigger)A contract term that speeds up unvested equity vesting when a company is acquired: single trigger accelerates automatically on the acquisition itself, double trigger requires both the acquisition and the person's termination or demotion afterward.
- Advisor Equity GrantsA small equity grant given to an advisor in exchange for ongoing, informal guidance, sized far below a co-founder or employee grant and vested over a shorter schedule.
- Offer Letter vs. Employment AgreementAn offer letter confirms the basic terms of at-will employment, title, compensation, start date; an employment agreement is a more comprehensive contract, typically for executives, that can add severance, non-compete terms, and specific termination conditions.
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