Just raised? What to do in the first 90 days

The worst time to hire engineers is the week your round closes, which is exactly when the pressure to start is highest.

By then the board has seen the hiring plan and the recruiters are lined up. What the hiring plan rarely shows is that the engineers you already have are about to onboard everyone you hire, right when they’re also being asked to deliver what the round promised.

Good engineers can build whatever roadmap you hand them. What they can’t do is onboard themselves.

Every new hire needs time from your best engineers, priorities that hold still long enough to learn the work, and a team that already ships on a rhythm they can join. The week after a raise is when all three are scarcest.

None of this is an argument against hiring. You raised the money to hire, and I’ve hired plenty myself, from the days of leading four engineers at RainKing through my time as CTO at DiscoverOrg/ZoomInfo.

If I were in your seat, I’d open the searches on day one, since the right engineers take a while to find, and use those weeks to get the team ready before the first ones start.

*The first 90 days after a raise, in the order I’d take them.*

That first month is for deciding what the bigger team will work on. Talk to customers about what’s next, pick the one or two things that matter most this year, and write down what won’t get built, so the priorities hold still when people start arriving.

In the second month, I’d make sure I was seeing working software every week, because a team that ships weekly is more likely to absorb new people than one that doesn’t.

I’d also have the team build the support new engineers will need, so they lean on it instead of your best people. That means documentation for the parts of the system that live only in someone’s head, and a review process tight enough to catch a new engineer’s mistakes before a customer does.

By the third month, I’d be hiring at the pace the team can absorb, and I’d know what each product costs to build and run. I could show the board what we’re building, why customers want it and when it will ship, next to the hiring numbers.

A round buys runway, and the first 90 days decide how far it takes you.

If you’ve been through a raise as a founder, an engineer or an investor, what would you tell a CEO whose round closed last week?