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For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Much
Make
Hires
Aptitude
Early
Team
Experience
Doesn
Matter

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No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.
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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
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Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
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Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
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As the company grows and about this 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company.
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Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you're bound to succeed
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The most common post YC failure case for the companies we fund, is they're incredibly focussed during YC on their company... and after they start doing a lot of other things. They advise companies, they go to conferences, whatever.
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In the early stage of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done.
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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.
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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
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Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
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If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.
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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
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The natural state of a start-up is to die most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
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Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
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... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.
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You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.
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