What key hire should a marketplace startup make immediately after the founders?

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Accepted Answer

Hi,

My first rule of hiring is simple: don't do it until it's absolutely painful not to.

Most founders rush to hire sales or marketing because they want to hand off the hard work. But early on, you need to do it yourself first. If you don't know how to sell your own marketplace, how will you know if a hire is actually doing a good job?

And my first hire is almost never “sales” in the abstract, instead it's the person who can best help me tackle what I feel is going to be the trickiest problem. For a marketplace, that’s usually going to filling the supply side or the demand side - and that may not have anything to do with sales. It might be someone with with industry relationships. Sometime who really undersands partnerships. Sometimes it’s a product generalist who can manually bootstrap the marketplace together until it starts running on it's own.

Early on, don’t hire a specific role. Hire the person who can happen to do the thing you desperately need to get going.