Startups Hire to Offload Chores or to Buy a Missing Skill
Early roles are often built from founders' leftover tasks.
Sidebean · How to get a startup job | SidebeanEarly hires at a startup do not start with a job description. They start with a founder's to-do list.
That is how Caya, the founder of Slidebean, describes hiring in the earliest days, when a company is new and many basic questions about who does what are still unanswered. He says the choice to hire comes from two needs. One is to hand off tasks, in his words, "they no longer want to do." The other is to bring in a skill the founders lack. None of the founders had sales experience, so they brought in Derek as their first head of sales after his time at Xero.
The founders list chores that eat their time, then group tasks that are close enough that one person can do or quickly learn them. That group becomes the opening.
Caya says he looks for people who can handle that kind of mixed bundle and keep moving fast as the company tests new ideas. The test is whether a hire will complain about work outside the original job. The people who fit like taking on work they have never done before when the job shifts.
His example is Gavi, one of his first hires, who led customer success for about two years. She handled customer support requests, automated onboarding, and efforts to maximize conversions.
He puts it plainly: "There's no career path in college for becoming a customer success manager."
Questions people ask
What does wearing many hats actually look like day to day?
It means your title is only a starting point. A customer support hire might answer tickets in the morning, rewrite help articles at lunch, and test a new signup email in the afternoon, because all three help keep customers. Startups value that range because there are too few people to hand each task to a specialist.
What is the second reason startups hire?
It happens when none of the founders can do the job at all. A team of engineers might need a salesperson, or a team of sellers might need a programmer. In that case the hire is brought in for depth in one missing craft, rather than to take a mixed pile of tasks off founders' plates.