an artist may be famous for their bravery “Stop hiring people” campaign but the reality is that every founder needs to assemble the right team if they want to scale. The a fast-growing AI startup builds AI workers for sales outreach and customer engagement. This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen spoke with Artisan co-founder and CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack about the early days of growing their team and the hiring mistakes that can kill them before they even get off the ground.
Making the wrong hires or filling the wrong positions are mistakes that quickly compound. They waste time, lower morale, and often create an execution lag that can be fatal to a startup trying to scale.
“I made a lot of mistakes in hiring — like, a lot in every role,” Carmichael-Jack said. “We’ve probably hired over 100 people to get to the 40 we have now.” But each mistake led to a valuable lesson that the founding team could implement going forward.
Over-recruitment
Keeping a team of 50 people on track and aligned to the mission is more difficult than a team of 10 people. “I thought if I hired all these roles and built this huge team, we would scale faster, but it actually makes it harder to scale,” Carmichael-Jack said.
No one on an early startup team should have downtime. Recruits should only happen when there is too much for the team to handle.
Logo shopping
An impressive resume with experience in some tech giants does not always indicate a person who is ready to participate in a startup. The skills needed to perform well in a high-resource team are not always the same as those needed to perform in a startup environment. A potential employee’s experience and enthusiasm are more important than big logos on a resume.
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Hiring too big or too small
Someone too far along in their career may not be able to operate in the chaos of an early-stage startup and expect structure that doesn’t yet exist. On the other hand, an employer that is too small will not have the ability to expand its functions.
Too quick to hire and too slow to fire
The recruitment process must be patient and thorough even with an effective candidate. Meanwhile, decisive action is best when someone doesn’t fit the team.
“Before, we were very slow. So we’d sit on a decision for weeks or months and not really do anything and try to help them a little bit, but not really, just float around. And when you do that, it never works,” Carmichael-Jack said. “You can tell someone isn’t working in a role, and usually they know it.”
Carmichael-Jack’s early mistakes are a reminder that recruiting isn’t just an operational business; is strategic. The wrong hire doesn’t slow you down; it can reshape your culture, lower your standards, and make every future hire difficult. And the correct ones converge at the same rate.
In the end, even one company that built AI workers learned the same lesson every founder learns: You can’t scale a company without people—they just have to have the right people.
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