Fundraise Team Hiring

---
name: fundraise-team-hiring
description: Use when a founder is shaping the team for a raise or hiring against the round. Triggers on "team slide", "what hires do investors want", "how much equity for an early hire", "key hire before fundraising", "is my team fundable", "hiring plan for the round". Connects the team story, the gap-filling hires, and the equity to grant.
---

# Fundraise Team & Hiring

Investors fund a team's ability to learn faster than the market changes. "Why
this team wins this bet" must be answerable without hand-waving - and the gaps
must be named with a credible plan, not hidden. This skill builds both the story
and the hiring plan behind it.

## When to use this skill

Use it while building the team slide in [[pitch-deck-builder]], when sizing the
option pool in [[cap-table-manager]], and when use-of-funds in the ask is mostly
"key hires."

## The team story investors fund

- **Earned right to win**: the specific experience or insight that makes this
  team unusually suited to *this* problem. Not a resume - a reason.
- **Founder-market fit**: why you, why now, the unfair advantage you carry.
- **Named gaps, owned**: every investor sees the holes. Naming them first
  ("we need a VP Eng by Q3, here's the pipeline") signals self-awareness;
  hiding them signals you can't see your own business.

## The hires that de-risk a round

The most fundable use-of-funds is hiring that converts your biggest risk into a
plan. Identify the one or two roles that most reduce investor doubt:

- If the risk is "can they build it" -> a senior technical hire or co-founder.
- If the risk is "can they sell it" -> a first sales/GTM leader once there is
  repeatable pull.
- If the risk is "can they keep them" -> a hire that owns retention.

Hire against the *milestone* from [[fundraising-stage-selector]], not a generic
org chart. A pre-seed company hiring a CFO is spending dilution on the wrong
risk.

## Equity for early hires (rough bands, calibrate to stage and seniority)

- First engineers (post-seed): ~0.25%-1.0%.
- Early senior leaders / first VPs: ~0.5%-2.0%.
- Pre-product-market-fit co-founder-level hire: 1%-5%+, vesting over 4 years
  with a 1-year cliff.

All early grants vest over 4 years with a 1-year cliff - no exceptions for
friends, advisors-turned-employees, or "we trust each other."

Grant from a pool sized to the *actual* 18-month hiring plan: list the roles,
assign each a band, sum it, add a small buffer. Investors often open by asking
for a 15-20% post-money pool; a plan-backed number usually lands closer to
10-12%, and the difference is founder dilution you keep by showing the math.
Size it deliberately in [[cap-table-manager]].

## Worked example: seed-stage devtools company

**Round:** $3M seed to reach $1M ARR in 18 months. **Team:** two technical
co-founders, one contract designer.

- Bad team slide: three headshots, university logos, a former employer's logo
  wall, "10+ years combined experience." No thesis, no gaps named. An investor
  reads it as "we hope the logos speak for us."
- Good team narrative: "We built the internal deploy tooling at [prior company]
  that this product replaces - we've felt this pain at 200-engineer scale and
  know exactly where the bodies are buried (earned right to win). Our gap is
  go-to-market: neither of us has sold. We're hiring a founding GTM lead in the
  first two quarters post-close - three candidates already in pipeline, all
  with devtools sales backgrounds."
- Hiring plan against the milestone ($1M ARR): founding GTM lead (1.0-1.5%,
  the round's key de-risking hire), two product engineers (0.4% each), a
  developer-relations hire in the back half if bottoms-up adoption is working
  (0.3%). Total planned grants ≈ 2.5%; buffer to 3.5%; **pool ask: 10%
  post-money**, defended with this list when the term sheet says 15%.
- What they did *not* hire: a CFO, a VP of Sales before a single repeatable
  deal, or a head of people for a team of six.

## Anti-patterns

- A team slide of logos with no "why this team" thesis.
- Hiring senior executives before product-market fit to "look fundable."
- An option pool set at a round-number default instead of the hiring plan.
- Handshake equity with no documented grant or vesting - a diligence landmine
  ([[fundraise-readiness-audit]]).

## Deliverable

A team narrative (earned right to win + founder-market fit + named gaps), a
prioritized list of the 1-2 risk-reducing hires tied to the round's milestone,
and an equity-grant plan with vesting that rolls up into the option-pool size.

## Quality bar

- The "why this team" thesis survives the question "couldn't a smart generic
  team do this?" - it names specific earned insight, not credentials.
- Every named gap comes with a role, a rough timeline, and evidence of pipeline
  or a sourcing plan - never a bare admission.
- Each planned hire maps to a named risk the round must retire, not an org-chart
  slot.
- Every grant has a band, 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff, and rolls up into
  a pool number derived from the plan - no round-number pool defaults.
- Nothing on the plan is a title the company only needs after the *next*
  milestone.