Hired a Senior Dev from a FAANG company. It was a disaster. I think I hired for the wrong stage.

For the first year of our startup, it was just me and two co-founders writing code. We finally raised a small pre-seed round and decided to make our first big hire: a Senior Software Engineer.

We were thrilled when we snagged someone from a major tech company (think Google/Meta). On paper, they were a rockstar. The resume was flawless, they passed our technical interview easily, and we paid a premium salary to get them.

Six months later, we had to let them go.

The problem wasn't their coding ability. The problem was the environment. At their previous job, they were used to a team of 50 people, a dedicated DevOps team, and a product manager handing them perfectly scoped Jira tickets.

At our startup, there was no product manager. There was no QA team. The infrastructure was held together with duct tape. They spent weeks waiting for instructions or trying to build complex, scalable architectures for a product that only had 300 users. When we asked them to just ship a quick, scrappy feature to test a hypothesis, they pushed back, saying it wasn't "best practice" to ship without 100% test coverage. They were paralyzed by ambiguity.

I realized I hired for scale when we desperately needed someone who could thrive in chaos. We needed a "0 to 1" builder who was okay with things being broken and moving fast, not a "1 to 100" optimizer.

Now we have to start the hiring process all over again, and our runway is shorter.

For founders who have made early hires: How do you screen for "startup fit" versus just raw technical talent?

Do you give them a messy, undefined problem in the interview? How do you ensure your first few hires are comfortable with wearing 5 different hats and dealing with constant ambiguity?