How Founders Direct, Attract, Reward, and Teach Their First Team
At ten employees there is no organization to absorb a bad hire. The first ten are the company — its judgment, its culture's founders, its capacity. This book gives founders a system for jobs one through ten, and a monthly loop that keeps the right people on the right work as the strategy changes underneath everyone.
Get notified at launchMost founder hiring advice treats each hire as a decision to get right once. Built for the First Inning treats the first team as a circuit you run monthly: set the strategy and the seats (Direct), find the people who want to be employee number three rather than employee number five hundred (Attract), build packages that are fair in a company where everyone knows everything (Reward), and teach the jobs that did not exist yesterday (Teach) — then return to the top, because the strategy moved while you were hiring. A run only counts if you touch every base.
Deriving jobs one through ten from the strategy; the founder's own seat (job zero); why sequence is strategy and role bundles beat titles.
The first-ten population is different; the honest pitch as a filter; assessing without a résumé that fits, with structure instead of sparkle.
Cash, equity, title, and learning as a portfolio; internal equity as the weather; incentives that aim at the right work instead of the countable work.
The two-period payoff of developing people; apprenticeship at company scale; growing seat four into what seat four must become.
The cadence that catches drift early; small redeployments before big severances; and the hard call when the company outgrows a loyal early hire.
Strategy → work → KSAs → seats 1–10.
Structured assessment, including stage-fit.
Fair pay by seat and stage.
Skills gap, teacher, deadline, evidence.
The one-page DART loop, run on a cadence.
Follow along as the book is written: The DART Diamond Podcast launches October 2026 with biweekly episodes walking the model one base at a time, plus conversations with founders about their first teams.