I actually don't agree with the first two points, at all. In fact, I've seen it NOT work firsthand for several startups I've worked for. > Don't hire for a par

I actually don't agree with the first two points, at all. In fact, I've seen it NOT work firsthand for several startups I've worked for. > Don't hire for a particular tool-chain or framework This is horrible advice. When you hire devs who don't know the toolchain or frameworks, they make obvious and glaring mistakes, especially if they're being asked to move quickly. It takes someone who is experienced with that toolchain or framework to get them up to speed, especially in the very beginning. If you want to avoid issues hiring people who are well-versed in your toolchains or frameworks, pick the most popular, attractive and/or mature ones. > Don't hire specialists You should absolutely hire specialists (or people who have even a little bit of experience in your vertical) for parts of your product that really matter. Usually hiring those 80/20 software engineers or contractors to build the first version of your core product is a terrible idea, because once you have paying customers it's hard to fix the issues that a specialist would not have made. This kind of thing leads to bad UX for customers, incidents in production, heavy on-call rotations, ridiculous technical debt that never seems to get solved, etc. Bigger companies can afford to hire a generalist and then pair them with a product manager. You can also probably get away with this if you're a highly specialized founder that can get the generalist up to speed with your requirements. But specialists are almost always a better fit for core product pieces. To be clear, a specialist does not _only_ need to have done that throughout their career, but they should at least be very knowledgable in that area. > Comfort in the False Negative Zone More shockingly bad advice. Your first hires _are your most important hires_. They will either make or break your company. Again, I've seen this at a couple of startups I've worked at. These hires will create all of your initial code and infra that will sustain past seed and into product market fit.