First 20 Hires Seal Your Fate

A place to concentrate scarce judgment

Among the points Alex Bouaziz makes about Deel's early scaling is a claim about hiring: a company's fate is sealed, at least seventy percent of it, by its first twenty hires.¹ He offers it as the corollary to a team-over-market view he holds, that he could build another billion-dollar business with the leaders he already has. The hard part, he notes, is that a founder is usually expert in only one function, engineering in his own case, yet must hire leaders for every function.

The stakes are asymmetric by role

Bouaziz argues the seventy percent is not spread evenly across the twenty. "Hiring the wrong director of finance very early won't detriment you in too many bad ways. But hiring the wrong operational leader, CTO, or sales leader early can be painful."¹ A few load-bearing early roles carry most of the fate, so the counsel he draws is to spend disproportionate rigor on those roles rather than treating all early hires as equal.

The screen is skill times hunger

The common denominator across his early leaders, Bouaziz says, is that they were "very sharp, care very deeply, ready to work like crazy," a screen he compresses to skill and hunger together with people he gets along with. Because such people "can work anywhere" and many "could be executives if not CEOs elsewhere," landing them is itself an act of selling, which connects this principle to his broader view that everything is sales: the founder embarks them on a journey where they see how large the company can become by joining rather than pursuing their own path. He also lists three signals he says are readable during the process and are contagious across a team: responsiveness, hunger, and optimism about the company. A negative, slow, or unenthused person on the executive team, in his account, is bad not only for that person but for the whole organization.¹

Bouaziz illustrates the screen with two hires. Elena, before Deel, had built her own consumer business in Asia selling Havaianas-type beach shoes, hustled, scaled it, and moved continents; within five minutes of meeting him she said, "I want to work with you, give me a job, I don't care, let's go." Chris, based in California, applied to a Deel role posted in Australia, said he simply wanted to work at Deel, and sent a two-minute video on why they should hire him; he became a key leader.¹ In both cases, in Bouaziz's telling, hunger overrode the literal fit of the posting.

The proof he cites, and the strain

The evidence Bouaziz points to is retention: the original leaders are, he says, still at Deel, including employee number six, who runs a large part of the sales organization, and a CTO hired around the fifteenth to twentieth employee, who remains in place. "If you nail those hires, they scale with you and you know you're in good hands."¹ The principle gives an early founder somewhere to concentrate scarce judgment and inverts the instinct to fix hiring later, since later rarely comes for the roles that shape the next hundred hires.

The claim carries its own strains. It is told by a founder whose bets worked, so the story of nineteen right out of twenty is subject to survivorship bias, and Bouaziz has acknowledged elsewhere taking early people-risks that failed badly. Skill times hunger also under-specifies fit for a given function: the candidate who applied to the wrong geography worked out as a generalist sales leader but would be a riskier bet for a specialist technical role. The principle is closely related to the give-a-damn signal that other founders describe and to the practice of hiring for spikes, which addresses what to weight within the skill half of the screen.