Hooked on FRIQ: What Great Looks Like (Part 3 of 6) - Issue 49
FRIQ = Founder Recruiting Intelligence Quotient
“I’m not sure I agree with you one hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.” -
Marge Gunderson, chief of police in the 1996 film, Fargo.
Hiring for your startup can feel like detective work. You’ve hired dozens — maybe hundreds — of people for engineering, product, or GTM roles. You’ve assembled teams at established companies with well-oiled hiring machines and startups with duct tape processes and varying degrees of chaos. Along the way, you’ve seen the good, the bad, and the outright baffling.
With all that hiring experience, you might believe you’ve developed a sixth sense for spotting great talent. But here’s the twist: hiring for your startup isn’t just a different challenge — it’s a whole new case file. Even the most seasoned founders find themselves rethinking what “great” really means in the context of their company’s journey.
What’s going on?
Great is contextual.
Hiring for your startup isn’t like hiring for the companies you’ve worked for before — or even the other companies you’ve founded. Your startup is unique, and so are the challenges it faces. You must write the playbook from scratch to ensure your hiring approach matches your current stage and goals.
We’ve invested in founders who believe their experience gives them all the answers. “Just send me resumes from [cool company logos] and [top schools],” they tell us. “I got this.”
Until they don’t “got this.” Hiring stalls, and teams struggle to deliver. Mismatched hires slow down progress, increase costs, and create problems that spread throughout the company.
Eventually, we get the S.O.S. call: “I’ve made a bad hire. They were rock stars at [cool company logo], but they’re not performing here, and it’s holding us back.”
Why does it matter?
Hiring for a startup isn’t just about talent — it’s about fit.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. The right hires at the right time can mean the difference between hitting your milestones and missing them, scaling successfully, or stalling out. Building a system to consistently identify and attract great talent isn’t just important — it’s existential.
The good news? When you get it right, hiring becomes a force multiplier. It simplifies sourcing, interviewing, onboarding, and retention. Most importantly, it gives you the momentum to hit milestones and keep growing.
What do others think?
“At every stage, you have to rethink what you need for that stage - both in terms of systems and the people who can help you get to the next level. Stage-appropriate hiring is all about understanding what’s required to succeed at each step. For example, in the early stages of building, culture plays a critical role in holding things together. I remember this vividly from the early days at Tableau.” – Francois Ajenstat, CPO at Amplitude, x-CPO at , from his Keynote at the Madrona Builders Summit 2024
“Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone’s life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those.” – Tobias Lutke, Founder and CEO of Shopify
What do we think?
“When you know, you know” isn’t a strategy.
While intuition plays a role in hiring, it’s just a starting point. Great hiring is about intentionality and context. It’s about defining what you need — right now — and finding people to help you hit the milestones directly in front of you.
The best hires align with your startup’s specific challenges and goals at its current stage. A rock star from a major tech company may struggle in a lean, scrappy environment. Even an experienced startup person who scaled a company from $10M to $100M ARR may not be the right fit to help you find your first ten customers.
The criteria for “great” will continue to adapt through your company’s S-curves.
Signals we’ve seen from founders who consistently hire great people for their stage:
Signals:
+You contextualize. You carefully spec roles using SMARTgoals and timelines for what problems need to be solved, why and by/when.
+You hire for the now. You hire the right person to solve the right problem at the right time (see point above).
+Every hire you make raises the collective bar.
+You study deeply to learn about roles you haven’t hired for before, across functions and levels. You seek calibration conversations with SMEs within those functions.
+You have a growth mindset, employ learning loops, and adapt to the current reality of your situation.
Limiters:
-You rely on proxies like candidates’ pedigrees and past successes in other contexts.
-You recruit by “braille”—relying on vague criteria rather than specific needs.
-You hire “senior” people (delegators versus doers) far ahead of your immediate needs.
-THIS IS A BIG ONE. You resist hiring people who are better than you in your area of expertise. Translation: you limit your ability to scale as a founder and leader by holding on to functional areas too long.
-You delay critical hires in unfamiliar functional roles (like sales).
-You think of hiring mistakes as a blame game rather than opportunities for you to learn.
What do YOU think?
How do you identify candidates who’ll thrive in the chaos and ambiguity of YOUR startup environment?
When was the last time YOU hired someone better than you at something? If you can’t think of one, what’s holding you back?
TAKE ACTION
1. Define your hiring philosophy
Sit down with your co-founders and write down your hiring principles: who you hire, how, and why. Keep it simple. It doesn’t need to be complex, but documenting these ideas will keep you aligned as you grow.
Make raising the bar a core principle. Every hire should bring something new and better to the team — not just a fancy resume.
2. Self-Reflect
Look at your team page. Are you highlighting flashy logos vs. relevant achievements? Focus on employee’s past wins that reflect your startup’s current stage.
Review your recent hires: Were your decisions evidence-based or gut-driven? Be honest about where you can improve.
Are you postponing critical hires in areas you don’t understand? Identify the gaps and address them.
3. Learn and Calibrate
Do the jobs yourself for a little while. Get hands-on experience with the roles you’re hiring for to understand the daily challenges.
Meet “calibration candidates,” people you’d love to hire for the role if only you could. These are people in the role at companies like yours to compare your expectations of what great looks like.
Immerse yourself in learning resources, such as podcasts or blogs from experts in key functions (e.g., Lenny’s Podcast for PMs).
4. Create Role Specs
Define the problem you’re solving with each hire. What specific business challenges do they need to address?
Set SMART goals for their first 3-6-12 months to ensure alignment and focus.
Clarify the must-have skills, soft skills, and motivations needed for success in your startup’s context.
Tools, Resources, Events
Can You Startup? — Audra Aulabaugh‘s observations for Seed, Series A, B, C. The sentiment here: Startups aren’t for everyone, and that’s okay. Stress-test your fit.
Hooked on Failed Hiring Forensics — While hiring mistakes can hurt your startup’s early ecosystem and team, don’t rush back in without looking into why the mistake happened.
Hooked on S-Curves — From the candidate’s perspective, be an investor in your career. Time isn’t free. The next cycle(s) you spend at a company should be treated as an investment and assessed multidimensionally.
Hooked on Hiring for the NOW — “We’ll just sort this out later” is a common refrain of many first-time founders.
Hooked on Talent Density — Every hire you make moves the density trend line up or down, raising or lowering your company’s collective bar, with compounded effects over time.
Hooked on FRIQ: Learning to Hire — Sure, you’ve built teams before, but startups demand a different playbook — one where hiring is mission-driven rather than transactional, and every new hire has an outsized impact on your trajectory.
Hooked on Career Arcs — From the candidate’s perspective, the experience and knowledge gained from being part of a startup are essential for success in larger companies, other startups, or even when founding your own business.
Why I Joined Temporal, by Sergey Bykov
Hooked on Meeting the Bar — If you don’t define the bar, how will you know when someone meets it?
Hooked on Conviction — If you wouldn’t work for you, why should anyone else?
Hooked on FRIQ’n Awesome — Founders who hire poorly are destined for mediocrity.
This post is the third of six in our Hooked on FRIQ'n Awesome series. Next time, we’ll discuss how and why Recruiting Hustle separates the great from the phenomenal early-stage founders and their leadership teams.
About Madrona
Madrona is a venture capital firm that helps entrepreneurs build companies of consequence. Hooked, by Madrona is a series about startup talent, careers, and founder stories, interpreted by a curious and skeptical VC + playbooks, tools, and templates to help company builders thrive.
Who creates Hooked?
The Talent Team @ Madrona Venture Group:
Shannon Anderson, Talent Scout, Director
Audra Aulabaugh, Talent Scout, Partner
Matt Witt, Talent Scout, Partner