On hiring generalists for your founding team
Do's & Don'ts about structuring their roles, hiring and finding them
This essay originally appeared on-chain via Wordcel, by Pratik Dholani. You can find the unedited version here.
Apart from a very small army of devs and designers, founders we have worked with have often brought on a generalist on their team. This is usually someone non-technical, “very” early career (sometimes even a university student), high energy and someone who has the ability to pick up new things on the fly. A company’s first generalists are the founders, who by default do all tasks not assigned to an expert within the team.
An additional generalist like the one described can hugely benefit the team, and the founders more directly by taking up key tasks, freeing up more of the founders’ time on the most important and urgent projects, and most importantly, product. As a founder, you don’t want additional management burden so early on, so it's best to see if you have enough things for such a hire which would make hiring worth it.
In case you’re at a similar stage deciding whether to hire or how to structure this role, here are some things we’ve seen generalists do and some we recommend they not do:
What they can do
Community and content
By the time you hire this person, you have probably already realised the importance of community in crypto. Community management is not just jazzing up your Discord but also screening for the best highest signal members, and producing content (social media, your newsletter, etc.) to attract more of them, and keep them engaged. Content will eventually require specialists of its own, but at this early stage best done by the same person. The secret here is to make sure it's someone's almost-full-time job to manage your community, and this hire can be the person at this early stage. A complete guide to crypto community management hasn’t been written yet, but the closest there is this piece by Siddharth Rao (Researcher @ Builders Tribe and Superteam Member).
Documentation
As you grow out of the early stages and hire more generalists, much of the processes you discover and implement for internal operations and principles of internal culture will get lost in the mix. There are cultural and recruitment hacks to ensure that this doesn’t happen early on, but if you’re reasonably successful, it will happen sometime soon. A long-tail way of minimizing this is to have strong documentation. Your processes, culture, contacts, know-how, secrets, guides, etc., having a private knowledge base of this will not only help onboard faster but help people do their jobs better after too.
User surveys and feedback
As you build and test out your hypotheses, it will become very important to get feedback from your early users and testers. It won’t just fly to you, someone will have to get into repeated conversations with the users, encourage feedback, and get the right insights from it. If you as a Founder think you’re not the best suited for this, this is something your new hire can do the heavy lifting on information and feedback collection as well. For example, they can focus on comms, interviews, and getting feedback, and you can focus on synthesising insights from it. Especially, since this person is already your primary community-facing person, they’ll become the obvious first choice for users to talk to, making it very easy to collect feedback as well.
Market research and analysis
Basic ecosystem study, market and competitor research will feed into your product, GTM, and sequencing strategy. Staying up to date with the latest developments in the space is important but can be time-consuming. You can entrust your hire with helping you out here as well.
Note: Even though many a times things will be chaotic and everyone will end up doing many things at the same time. As much as possible, especially for roles general by design, try to force them to focus on one project at a time. Whatever the decided project time is, 3 days, a week, 2 weeks or a quarter, focus, and move on after completion!
What they should not do
What is part of their role is important, but it is also important for you to what you should not delegate to them. Generally speaking, you won’t need to actively communicate it as an exclusion to their role, but still important to keep it at the back of your head.
Partnerships and business development
If you as a founder have a decent founder-market fit, you will already know many of the other founders and decision makers in your market. They should become the first group to be targeted for partnerships. The founders’ are also best placed to pitch the product to potential partners and the initial set of users so early on. Lots of work you do early on with and for your users will be dynamic, i.e. all team members might know at all times what specific thing you will or will not do for a customer. Exceptions will be made aplenty, but only you as a founder will be fully confident enough to make these decisions on the fly. New generalist hires may help you manage the partnership down the line, and even start onboarding people when your network is exhausted.
Product and project management
They can help document, gather insights, and do some other related operational work, but you as a founder should be primarily in charge of the core product at this time. It is one of the most, if not THE most important factor in your success or failure as a company, and should always be your number 1 priority. This is exactly the kind of work you want to free yourself up for by hiring a helping hand. Do not delegate.
Hiring
This one is tricky since hiring is important and involves a lot of steps and processes even at (and especially) a company your size. What to hire for, what kind of person to hire, whether to hire someone or not, all of these are decisions solely to be made by founders. If the product will determine the outcome of your company, the people will determine the quality of your product. This should all be the founder's responsibility. If at all, some parts of the process here that you’d qualify as “recruitment operations” including managing relationships with recruiters, figuring out where to find x kind of people, sourcing very top funnel, scheduling interviews, etc., is something that you’d be fine letting your hire handle.
Bonus: Do not invent new work
Over the last few years, there has been an over-glorification of this role in different names — “Chief of Staff”, “BizOps”, “Founders Office”, etc., they’re all variations of the same thing. The key here is to know that at its core, this job is that of helping the founder with the smallest of things, like how an assistant would. It is also okay if sometimes this person does not have any work. Having some free time, doing extra research, etc., is better than inventing new fake work to do which may be counterproductive and actually slow down your company. Anyone who doesn’t understand that will probably be bored, unwilling to do the small things, or feel very low status in the role, and should not be hired.
Finding the right person
As said, the best kind of hires here are usually (1) early career with generally less than 3 years of experience, (2) have a very fast learning rate, (3) very high energy, and (4) happy to do whatever is thrown at them, regardless of how unimportant it seems. Many of them would currently be doing a similar role, or be some other “type A” non-tech job in consulting, investment banking, etc., and looking for a way out into tech. There’s no specific formula for finding the right fit or any standard job description that you can fork. Just put up an accurate, non-fluffy, horribly realistic JD talking about the kinds of low-status work they’ll have to do, and then only talk to people who are still open to doing the job. [If you’re looking to hire someone, do check out Superteam Talent.]
DM us at @ftxsuperteam on Twitter in case you’re looking for more specific help on setting up your early team.
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