Assembling Top Talent for New Ventures

Lessons from Building a Web3 Founding Team

The difference between a successful startup and a failed one often comes down to who joins in the first year. I've seen this play out repeatedly as both a founder and investor: early team composition is destiny. 

Most founders get this wrong in two ways. First, they rush to hire, treating early team building like regular recruiting. Second, they use outdated playbooks, offering standard equity packages and traditional roles to founding team members. 

When we built NEAR in 2018, we took a different approach. Eight of our first nine team members came through the personal networks of two co-founders. More importantly, we structured the team so that several early members thought of themselves as co-founders, regardless of their official titles or token stakes. 

The strongest early teams share five traits: 

- High trust between members 

- High individual agency 

- Bias for action over discussion 

- Light management with built-in accountability 

- Selective growth (hire slow, fire fast) 

Early-stage startups can't rely on job boards. When your brand is unknown, your network is your best recruiting tool. For a deeper dive on this topic, Vinod Khosla's "Gene Pool Engineering" is essential reading. 

Each new hire should become a recruiting multiplier. Sit down with them, review their LinkedIn connections, and identify potential matches for open roles. Make recruiting part of their onboarding process. 

Recruiting is a long game. The perfect candidate might not be ready to join today, but could be persuadable in six months. Success depends on two factors: their dissatisfaction with their current role and how compelling your opportunity appears. 

This becomes even harder when you're building something non-consensus. When we were recruiting for NEAR, blockchain wasn't an obvious career move. The best candidates often need to believe in contrarian ideas before they become mainstream. 

Look for three types of people: 

- High-agency individuals who create momentum 

- People with strong aptitude over just experience 

- Undervalued talent (immigrants, late bloomers, career changers) 

The market consistently undervalues these groups, and they often outperform traditional candidates. 

The traditional model of giving ~1% equity to early employees is broken. When you find exceptional people, you need to structure deals that make them think and act like founders. At NEAR, we experimented with token distribution models that gave early team members more skin in the game. 

You can't create founder-level commitment with employee-level ownership. Whether through equity or tokens, the economics need to match the expectations. 

The best early teams need little traditional management. Instead, focus on: 

- Creating clear accountability systems 

- Maintaining team cohesiveness 

- Having one clear leader who sets the direction 

- Understanding individual motivations 

Some founders take team dynamics very seriously, even using AI models to simulate and improve conflict resolution. While this might seem excessive, it shows how critical team cohesion is at the early stage. 

Bad hires at this stage aren't just costly - they're existential threats. They can introduce premature politics, damage culture, or simply waste precious runway. But don't confuse bad hires with people who need time to grow into roles. The difference is usually visible in their approach to problems and willingness to learn. 

Building an early-stage team is more art than science. The key is finding people who can operate with founder-level commitment, structuring deals that align incentives, and creating an environment where high-trust, high-agency individuals can thrive. The time you invest in getting this right will compound throughout your company's life.