Founders know their first 50 hires will shape their company forever. This group doesn’t just fill seats; they establish culture, build early systems, and decide whether the startup can survive the chaos of the early years.

But what exactly should you be hiring for? Not polished résumés, not blue-chip credentials, not “culture fit” in the corporate sense. The first 50 hires have to thrive in an environment where nothing is stable, everything is urgent, and growth depends on ingenuity.

Here are five qualities world-class founders and investors emphasize when building their early teams.

Quality 1: Resilience in the Face of Chaos

Startups are inherently volatile. Markets shift, products break, fundraising falls through. The people who join early must be prepared for that reality—and able to push forward anyway.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, has described startups as “jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down.” Your early team members need to embrace that metaphor, not run from it.

Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky has echoed this, recalling how early employees stuck around even when investors laughed them out of the room. It wasn’t technical skill alone that mattered. It was the willingness to persist when everyone else doubted them.

Lesson: Hire people who have lived through messiness before, whether in startups, scrappy side projects, or unconventional career paths. A perfect résumé can mask a lack of resilience.

Quality 2: A Bias Toward Action

In the early days, startups don’t have layers of management or processes. If something is broken, someone has to fix it—immediately. That requires a bias toward action: people who default to trying, building, and pushing forward rather than waiting for permission.

Stripe's Patrick Collison has said that one of the most important qualities they looked for early on was people who were “unreasonably effective” at just getting things done. This bias helped Stripe scale quickly while competitors drowned in overthinking.

Ben Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, makes a similar point: early employees can’t just be idea people. They need to “put the gloves on” and do the gritty work themselves.

Lesson: In interviews, probe for moments when candidates acted without a roadmap, when they solved problems nobody asked them to solve.

Quality 3: Adaptability and Range

In a startup, roles aren’t static. Today’s marketing hire might be building landing pages; tomorrow, they’re running customer interviews; next week, they’re pulling data for a board deck. The first 50 hires have to flex across multiple disciplines.

Shopify's Tobi Lütke once said, “The early team are not specialists, they are problem-solvers.” Jack Dorsey has made a similar observation, explaining that in the early days of Twitter, the best hires were those who could wear three hats at once.

It doesn’t mean specialists have no place on your early team. But you should value specialists who can also generalize. People who get bored or territorial won’t thrive.

Lesson: Look for evidence of range: side hustles, non-linear career paths, or times when someone moved between very different roles successfully.

Quality 4: Emotional Intelligence and Communication

In small, high-pressure teams, communication breakdowns can damage fledgling company culture. That’s why emotional intelligence—empathy, self-awareness, and clear communication—is an underrated superpower in early hires.

Marc Andreessen has pointed out that “in a startup, every miscommunication is magnified tenfold.” When only 20 or 30 people are in the room, one bad communicator can create outsized chaos.

Founders like Stewart Butterfield of Slack and Melanie Perkins of Canva stress the importance of humility and collaboration in their earliest hires. The best early employees not only get things done, but also bring others along, reducing friction in environments already full of it.

Lesson: Probe for EQ as much as IQ. Ask candidates about moments they resolved conflict, persuaded a skeptic, or gave tough feedback without blowing up a relationship.

Quality 5: Mission Obsession

Finally, startups are too hard to survive without genuine belief in the mission. The first 50 hires aren’t mercenaries; they’re missionaries.

Elon Musk has said that one of Tesla's unfair advantages was early employees who were “deeply, insanely committed” to the mission of sustainable energy, even when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy.

Similarly, Sequoia Capital often advises founders to filter for mission-driven hires. If candidates are primarily motivated by compensation, they’ll leave when things get tough. If they’re motivated by the problem, they’ll stay when the company needs them most.

Lesson: Make the mission explicit in interviews. Ask candidates why this specific problem matters to them. The right ones will light up.

Wrapping Up

The first 50 hires will do more than any subsequent group to define whether your startup thrives or dies. World-class founders consistently emphasize qualities that go far beyond résumés:

• Resilience in the face of chaos.

• Bias toward action over deliberation.

• Adaptability and range to wear many hats.

• Emotional intelligence and communication skills.

• Mission obsession that fuels persistence.

Before you make those early offers, ask yourself: is this person ready for the volatility, speed, and messiness of a startup? Skills can be taught, but resilience, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and mission-driven grit are what keep a young company alive.