Dec 8, 2025
One skill that pre-seed startups or first time founders share with early-stage VC’s is the need to identify great people before anyone else.
When you are a first time founder and early in your startup journey you are likely okay-capitlized (at best), offering okay-salaries (at best), and offering equity for a startup that typically has a lot more going against it than for it.
You then need to convince people to join you vs all their other options. A startup at its essence is the combination of it’s people. You need people that can do great work, and a lot of it. Elon Musk has a well known quote saying companies are the “Vector Sum” of their people. In other words its important to not only have great people, but also to also have them aiming their efforts in the same direction or they will cancel each other out.
Great people are, rightly so, strongly in demand. The founding engineer that has already figured out the right balance between quality / quantity and gotten a company to series A, the GTM hire that has gotten two start-ups from 0-$5M ARR, or the designer that managed to paint a picture of a brand to thousands of minds without a budget are, at this point, known as great.
To make it worse, great people know they’re great! Actually everyone knows they’re great, and you need great people to build a successful company. Then the paradox shows up: Why would a great person join your early stage startup when they have better options? Heck, you probably can’t even afford them! You want to have a great company but now we’re back at square 1!
A lot of first-time founders know this and take the bad route of trying to convince known great people to join. They will offer super high equity, and put themselves in the wrong footing. They will also assume the wrong kind of people are great and try to hire FAANG engineers or IB/Consultants assuming they’re great (even if they could afford them most aren’t great in this regard).
To get a bit more philosophical, let’s define what a great person is. Is a person great because of what they’ve accomplished? Or have they accomplished things because they’re great? The answer, in my opinion, is the latter. Great people have always been great, and some of them have had a chance to achieve their potential.
For great people to achieve this potential though, they need opportunity and direction. Meaning they need to have the chance to achieve it, and the environment needs to let them direct their efforts well.
That is the real job of an early stage founder. This skill is what proves the greatness of a founder. Just like how early stage VC’s are looking for miss-priced great founders, founders can find great people before the market (and sometimes before they) even know they’re good.
The beauty of this is not that you are able to “get a bargain”, but that your company becomes the vessel that uncovers greatness. The greatest gift you can give people who trust you early, before you would even trust yourself, is helping them achieve their greatest potential. You’re not hiring because of the market opinion, you look at a person for who they are and decide that they can do amazing work.
I may sound biased, but the entire Querio team fits this perfectly. I pride ourselves on seeing greatness in others, and on giving them the space and opportunity to achieve it. Every single person that works at Querio will become known as great, I am absolutely certain. They will be known by the market and themselves as great because of what they achieved at Querio. Knowing this means we’ve already succeeded in some ways, and, well, it’s now inevitable.
So how do you become a great founder and find great people? I think that question is a lot more complex. I will leave you with a few of my opinions to look out for.
Greatness alone is not enough, you need fit. The person needs the right opportunity and they need the role to match the type of potential.
Great people are opinionated. Just because someone has been trained by corporate to not speak up, does not mean they don’t have good thoughts.
Great people are humble, and humility doesn’t exclude confidence.
Great people are ambitious. They love improving, they want more. They want to do great work.
Great people are naturals in their field. The work they are good at feels easy to learn and focus on.
Great people have high standards. They care about the paddings and margins, the tech debt, the lead quality.
Great people are thoughtful in their craft. They don’t do things just because.
Great people enjoy working with great people. If your team connects and bonds well, especially early on, that’s a great sign.
You can feel if someone is great in the right context. Your hiring process should give you that feeling at-least once.
On a final note, I briefly mentioned how great people need to be identified early and given a chance, but what role do you play?
You need to enable them, and guide the team to move in the same direction. Sometimes you’ll need to push them to give their opinion or think about things from first principles, most times you need to get out of their damn way and let them fall in love with the work they are doing.
As a founder, you need to also be great by actually trusting the people, believing in them more than they believe in themselves, and do your part of the job.
If you want to work at a great company, or you want to use a great product, please email me directly: rami@querio.ai.
