Every step change in the world came from a small group of people who found each other. Your team is the ceiling on what you can attempt, and your bar is what determines your team. You set that bar once and everyone after inherits it.
We are your scouts. We help you set it and hold it high.
01
The bar erodes by default
When you're building your team — the first 10, the first 20, the first 100 — you start with the intention of keeping the bar high.
Then scope grows, requirements stack up, and the pressure to fill the gap builds. Someone doing mediocre work starts to look better than work not moving at all. Sometimes you do it so your existing team isn't stretched too thin and gets some breathing room to do their best work.
Each of those calls is defensible on its own. Together they lower the bar a little at a time, and you don't notice until you're restructuring or reshaping your organisation.
By the 100th hire, this becomes the identity and culture of your company.
We help you fight this entropy.
02
Why us
Rahul and Sid have both worked inside early-stage companies since their teens. Both have been founders, raised pre-seed rounds, and built their own teams.
Between them they've worked across GTM, product and research — covering both sides of an early-stage org: GTM (customer success, support, marketing, sales) and EPD (engineering, product, design).
- We only work with early-stage teams, and help them build toward their first 100 team members.
- We work with a very limited set of companies at a given time.
03
How we work with you
- For every role, we start with your team on the outcome — what this person is actually here to drive in the first year, and what traits someone who succeeds in this role carries. We work with you to define what a bar raiser looks like for this role.
- We send you a handful of operators, not a stack of resumes. We share our reasoning on why we think they clear the bar. If we don't have anyone worth sending, we don't waste your team's time.
- We tell you when the problem isn't the pipeline. Sometimes the role is scoped wrong, the comp is off, or the interview process is losing people. We help you fix it.
04
How we work with operators
- We only source people who actually want to work at an early-stage company. Not people looking for a safer version of a big-company job. People who want the ambiguity, the scope, and the chance to shape something.
- We're honest with them about what they're walking into. The stage, the runway, the parts of the job that are genuinely hard, and what the first six months will actually feel like.
- We tell them when a role isn't right for them, even when it would be easy not to.
Tell us about the first role you can't afford to get wrong.
hello@firsthundred.team