> It's a hard role to hire for, especially at the start. The approach of "I'm going to hire someone to build me a team" only works if you know someone excellen

> It's a hard role to hire for, especially at the start. The approach of "I'm going to hire someone to build me a team" only works if you know someone excellent. It is a very low percentage strategy if hire #1 is from the market. That doesn't mean you can't find excellent people through the market, but you'll have to see them work first, and it might take a few tries. You won't be able to spin up your own interview funnel and get good results. Hiring freelancers and seeing who gets it is probably the only way your organization can reliably detect talent (whereas a software company would have an interview funnel as a core competency). Once you have a freelancer who gets it, you can ask them if they want to join, or if they want to get paid to interview for you. Talent likes to work with talent, and the freelancer will be better at interviewing than you. Repeat this process until you have a team. Eventually you may want management, but by the time you need management, you should have a pool of engineers large enough that one of them would be willing and able to manage the rest. They will be more competent than any manager you try to hire from the market by a mile.