Your first 10 hires are your culture.

There's a version of your company that exists in your pitch deck, and there's the version your first ten hires build while you're busy fundraising.

Guess which one candidates, customers and future employees actually experience?

Early hires don't just do the work — they set the defaults. How feedback is given. What "done" means. Whether people flag problems early or hide them until launch week. Every hire after them calibrates to those defaults, not to your values doc.

So treat the first ten like the strategic decisions they are. Scope the role before you open it. Decide what excellent looks like before the first interview. Check for the behaviours you want multiplied, because that's literally what will happen — multiplied.

Culture isn't a Notion page you write later. It's a compounding function of who you let in first.