Mistake #7: I Was Hiring. I Was Actually Collecting Believers.
This is the seventh post in a series about the mistakes I made starting up, and what I’d tell myself if I could go back.
When you are early, and unproven, and building something most people do not fully understand yet, someone saying yes to joining you feels significant.
Not just professionally. Personally.
They saw what you saw. They were willing to bet on something that had no track record, no brand name behind it, no safety net. They chose you and your idea over more stable options. That means something.
The mistake I made was letting that feeling do the work of a hiring decision.
What Hiring for Gratitude Looks Like
It does not look like desperation. That is the thing. It looks like momentum.
Someone in your network expresses interest. They are smart, you like them, the conversation goes well. They are not the most experienced person you could find for the role, but they are enthusiastic. They believe in what you are building. They say things in the interview that make you feel understood.
You make the offer.
The job description was one thing. What you actually hired was someone who validated your vision at a moment when validation felt scarce.
That is not a hire. That is a coping mechanism with a salary attached.
In the early days of Hyperleap, I made this mistake more than once. People joined because they trusted me, because they liked the idea, because the energy in the room was good. And I said yes to them because their enthusiasm felt like a signal about the company, when really it was just a signal about them being enthusiastic.
The role still needed to be done. The skill gap still existed. The enthusiasm did not fill it.
Why Early Founders Do This
There are a few things happening at once.
The first is psychological. When you are building something from nothing, with limited proof and a lot of uncertainty, every person who says yes feels like confirmation. You are not just filling a role. You are building a case that the thing you are doing is worth doing. New hires become evidence.
The second is practical. Early hiring is genuinely hard. You cannot compete on salary with established companies. You cannot offer the stability a large employer offers. The people with the most experience and the most options have the most reasons to go somewhere safer. So, when someone good enough, someone who seems capable and committed, says yes, the temptation is to close quickly before they change their mind.
The third is relational. Many early hires in Indian startups come through personal networks. A friend. A former colleague. Someone who knows someone. These relationships carry social weight. Saying no to someone you know, someone who is genuinely excited and wants to be part of what you are building, feels like rejection. It feels ungrateful. And we are, as we discussed in Mistake #5, not wired for that kind of confrontation.
So, the hire happens. And the mismatch becomes visible six months later, when the role has grown and the person has not grown with it, or when the skill the role actually needed was never really there.
The Hidden Cost
The easy version of this mistake is financial. You pay someone for work that is not getting done well, you eventually have to let them go, and you start over. That is expensive and slow.
The harder version is what it does to the team.
When someone is in a role, they are not right for, and everyone around them can see it, it creates a particular kind of organisational drag. The people who are doing their jobs well start to wonder why standards are uneven. The person in the wrong role often knows, at some level, that they are not quite right for it. That knowledge creates its own anxiety, its own defensiveness.
And the founder who made the hire out of gratitude is now managing a situation that is harder to resolve because it is also personal. You hired them because they believed in you. Letting them go now feels like a betrayal of that belief. So you wait. You try to make it work. You create a role around their strengths rather than filling the role the company actually needs.
Months pass. The problem compounds.
I have been on both sides of this. I have made the hire and felt the guilt of eventually having to undo it. I have also watched founders I know hold on to people far longer than they should have because the relationship made clarity hard.
Gratitude Has a Place. It Is Not in the Hiring Decision.
Let me be precise about this.
I am not saying you should not hire people who believe in what you are building. Conviction matters enormously in an early hire. Someone who is genuinely excited about the mission, who understands what you are trying to do, who would rather be here than somewhere more comfortable, is a real asset.
What I am saying is that conviction is not a substitute for capability. It is a multiplier on capability. If the capability is not there, the conviction just means they work harder at the wrong things.
The question to ask in every early hire is not “do they believe in this?” It is “can they do this job at the level this company needs, right now, and in six months when the job has evolved?” Those are different questions. The first one is easy to answer in an enthusiastic interview. The second one requires more rigour than most early founders apply.
What the Right Hire Feels Like
This is harder to describe than the wrong hire, but it is worth trying.
The right hire makes you slightly uncomfortable in the interview. Not because they are a bad fit, but because they push back. They ask questions you do not have clean answers to. They have opinions about how things should be done that are not identical to yours. They are evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them.
The wrong hire, the gratitude hire, tends to agree a lot. They are excited. They want the job. The conversation is warm and easy.
Warm and easy is a good sign in a customer conversation. In a hiring conversation, it is worth examining.
The person who challenges you in the interview is not being difficult. They are showing you that they have standards of their own. That they are not just looking for a place to land. That they will hold themselves and you to something.
That is who you want in the company when things get hard.
What I’d Tell Myself Now
Write the job description before you start talking to people. Not a list of requirements copied from another job posting. A real description of what this person will do in the first ninety days, what success looks like at six months, and what the hardest parts of the role are. Then use that as the filter, not the energy in the room.
Separate the relationship from the hire. If someone you like and respect applies for a role, run the same process you would run for anyone else. If they are the right person, the process will confirm it. If they are not, better to know before you make the offer than after.
Gratitude does not belong in the hiring room. Being moved that someone believes in you is fine. It is human. But the moment you find yourself leaning toward a hire because you feel grateful for their enthusiasm, that is the moment to pause and ask harder questions.
Hire for the role the company needs, not the role you can sell to the candidate. Early founders sometimes unconsciously reshape the role to match the candidate rather than the other way around. You end up describing a version of the job that sounds exciting and achievable for this particular person, rather than the version of the job that actually needs doing.
Move faster on mismatches than feels comfortable. When you realise you have made a gratitude hire and the mismatch is real, the kindest thing you can do for everyone is address it early. The longer you wait, the more expensive it becomes for the company, and the more painful it becomes for the person.
The Underlying Lesson
Early hiring is one of the highest-leverage decisions a founder makes. The first ten or fifteen people shape the culture, the standards, and the velocity of everything that follows.
When you fill those seats with people who are right for the role, you build something that compounds. When you fill them with people you hired because they believed in you, you build something that needs constant maintenance.
Belief in the founder is a starting point. It is not a qualification.
The company you are building needs people who can do the work. Your job as the founder is to find them, even when finding them is harder and slower and less immediately gratifying than hiring the person in front of you who really, really wants to be there.
The bus needs the right people on it.
Not just the willing ones.
The bottom line: Early founders often hire people who are excited about the founder and the vision rather than demonstrably right for the role. Enthusiasm feels like a signal. It is not a substitute for capability. The gratitude hires costs more than the gap hire, because it comes with a relationship that makes the inevitable correction harder and slower.
Have you made a gratitude hire? How did you handle it when you realised the fit was off? I’d like to hear.
I’m Gopi Krishna, founder of Hyperleap AI, where we build enterprise-grade conversational AI but for small and medium sized businesses across the world. This is part of an ongoing series on the mistakes I made in my first years as a founder, written for anyone thinking about starting something of their own. Subscribe to Second Order AI on Substack to follow along.