Building the Core Team

Your first 5 hires will determine if your company succeeds or fails. You aren't looking for 'Skills' alone; you are looking for **Ownership Mindset** and **Ambiguity Tolerance**.

1. The 'Generalist' Architect

Early on, you don't need a '.NET Expert' or a 'React Expert'. You need someone who can write a C# API in the morning, fix a CSS bug in the afternoon, and help you talk to a customer in the evening. Avoid 'Corporate' devs who are used to having a PM, a QA, and a DevOps team—they will be paralyzed by your lack of process.

2. Portfolios > Resumes

Don't just look at where they worked. Look at **What they built**. Ask for their Github or a side project they launched. An engineer who has built and shipped something end-to-end is worth 10x more to a startup than someone who worked on a tiny part of a massive enterprise system.

4. Career Mastery

Q: "How do I interview for a startup?"

Architect Answer: "Give them a real, messy task. 'Here is a bug in our staging environment—go fix it.' Don't do LeetCode. See how they handle a codebase they haven't seen before, how they ask questions, and how they handle the pressure of a ticking clock. This is the only 'Signal' that actually matters."