Patient-Then-Floor-It Hiring
Be obsessively patient hiring the founding team; step on the gas the moment demand exceeds what you can handle
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Foody's correction to the blanket 'hire slowly' advice. For the founding team, be extremely patient and disciplined — that talent density compounds. But the standard advice becomes a liability past the founding stage: once you know the business is working and there's far more demand than you can handle, moving slowly is itself the mistake. The trigger to accelerate is not a headcount number but the moment demand outstrips capacity.
Origin
Brendan Foody, CEO of Mercor, reflecting that Mercor's discipline made its first ~10 hires phenomenal but that the company likely could have grown even faster had it ramped from ~10 to 100 more quickly.
Core principles
- 01The founding ~10 hires justify extreme patience; that density shapes the whole org
- 02'Hire slowly' is a double-edged sword — past founding stage it can cap growth
- 03The accelerate-trigger is a state, not a number: when demand far exceeds what you can handle
- 04Accept hiring variance once you're scaling for speed — perfection is no longer the constraint
- 05Speed matters most once the market vacuum is confirmed
How to run it
- 1
Be patient and disciplined for the founding team
Take the time to land some of the best people in the world for the first hires; accept the speed cost.
Pro tip Mercor's first hires included scale's former head of growth and an operator who'd scaled two consumer apps past 100k users.
- 2
Detect the 'it's really working' state
Watch for the signal that demand far exceeds what the team can handle — the market vacuum. This, not a headcount, is the trigger.
Pro tip Don't anchor on '10 people'; the line is wherever you know demand outstrips capacity.
Watch out Waiting past this point for perfect hires is where disciplined teams leave growth on the table.
- 3
Step on the gas and accept variance
Ramp headcount fast (e.g. 10→100), optimizing for speed and accepting that some hires will vary in quality.
Pro tip Some functions simply need a lot of people to execute — recognize when volume, not selectivity, is the bottleneck.
In the wild
Foody is thrilled the first 10 hires were phenomenal, but judges that Mercor moved too slowly scaling from roughly 10 to 100 people and could have grown even faster despite already being the fastest-growing company in history.
→ A retrospective lesson: keep founding-team discipline, but accelerate the mid-stage ramp once demand is proven.
Common mistakes
Applying 'hire slowly' at every stage
Discipline that's right for the first 10 becomes a growth cap once demand far exceeds capacity.
Waiting for a headcount milestone to accelerate
The trigger is the state of demand-exceeds-capacity, not reaching a specific number of employees.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders past initial traction deciding when to shift from selective to high-volume hiring
Not ideal for
Pre-PMF teams that haven't yet confirmed demand exceeds their capacity
From the transcript
“especially for our first 10 people, we were just so patient and disciplined about finding some of the best people in the world”
“once you know that there's so much more demand than you can handle, that's when you want to step on the gas and optimize for…”
“in some ways we move too slowly with how we scaled out the team”
From the episode
Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history
Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor)