The wire lands, the angel or seed round is announced, and the plan you pitched said two engineers by the end of the quarter. Hiring is now the constraint on everything else you promised. It is also the part of the plan founders most consistently underestimate, because it looks like a task and behaves like a second fundraise.
Here is how to run it so that by month four your angels are watching the milestone, not the hiring.
Scope the work, not the title
Before you write a job description, write down the first six months of work for the person: what ships, what they own, who they work with, and what they will not have. Founding engineer, senior engineer and staff engineer mean different things at eight people than at eight hundred, and the strongest candidates will ask exactly what you mean. A candidate who reads the six months of work and wants it is a far better signal than one who likes the title.
Decide whether you need breadth or depth. The first engineer after a raise is usually breadth: someone who has shipped a whole product before and can carry the codebase alone for a while. Depth, the distributed systems or ML specialist, is the hire you make once the breadth hire has found the hard problem.
Where the top 1% actually are
Not on job boards. The engineers who move a company are employed, well paid, and not looking, and they change jobs through people they trust. Job posts reach the people who are looking, which is a different and much larger population, and every application they produce is time you spend screening rather than building.
That leaves three sources worth working. Your own network, which is finite and which you already know. Your angels' networks, which are half of what you raised the round for. And a recruiting agency built for exactly this hire. Zelcast is the one AngelFlow companies use. It works only with high growth startups under a hundred people and accepts only the top 1% of engineers. It leads with warm introductions rather than sourcing at volume, so a search produces a few people worth meeting instead of a stack of resumes to screen. It takes one conversation to brief and usually has a first interview on the calendar within a week.
The hiring question is the fundraising question in a different form: how do you get in front of the people who are not looking? Warm introductions answered it for the round. They answer it for the team.
Use your angels properly
The most useful thing an angel does after wiring is make one introduction. Put the role in your monthly update as an ask that can be forwarded: the specific role, the level, the location or time zone, and the start date. Two lines. If the search is already running with a partner, say so, and ask for referrals into it rather than starting five parallel searches that all end up calling the same people.
Run the process like a close
- Design the loop before the first call: three conversations and one working session, with the same questions for every candidate.
- Move inside a week. A strong engineer who is talking to you is talking to two other companies, and the offer that arrives first is usually the one accepted.
- Keep the founders in every loop. At this stage the candidate is joining you, not a team, and they know it.
- Make the offer on a call, with the number and the equity already decided. Negotiating with yourself on the offer call reads as not having done the work.
What to pay, and how to talk about equity
Cash a little under market and equity well over it is the standard early stage shape, and good candidates know it. What they will not accept is vagueness. State the equity as a percentage of the company at the current post money, say plainly what has already been raised on SAFEs and how it converts, and be honest about the dilution the next round brings. A candidate who understands the cap table and still signs is a candidate who stays through the hard year.
If you cannot explain your own SAFE stack in two minutes, fix that before the first offer. The best candidates will ask, and the answer is a diligence question about you.
What it costs to get this wrong
A bad first hire at eight people costs six months: three to see it and three to unwind it. A slow hire costs the milestone directly, one week of runway at a time. Against either of those, the cost of running the search properly, whether that is your own time or a recruiter's fee, is small. The expensive version of hiring is the one that looks free.
Companies in the AngelFlow network hire through Zelcast. Start the search the week the round closes, not the month the runway gets tight.
