Want to Keep Your Early-stage Employees? Don’t Give Them Fancy Titles

In 2017, I was about to make our first business hire. This person would lead one of our most important functions. I was excited — he looked great on paper, and I was ready to make it happen.

I ran it by our investors first. "He looks good, and we're supportive," they said. "But whatever you do, don't make him a VP."

I pushed back. They held firm. I agreed — reluctantly — to follow their advice.

Six months later, I understood exactly why. And I was grateful I'd listened.

Here's the trap that catches almost every first-time founder.

You need to hire someone to lead a function where you're not a subject matter expert. That's why you're hiring them. But because you're not an expert, you can't accurately assess how good they actually are. Your benchmark is low — probably yourself or someone else doing the job part-time with no real experience. So you overestimate.

You find someone who wants to join — but only as a VP. Compared to your low bar, they seem great. And hey, titles are free, right? So you make them a VP.

Six to twelve months pass. Your company starts to scale. You've now learned what a real VP-level executive actually looks like — and you realize you hired someone who is, at best, a senior manager or director.

You raise your A round. Your investors tell you to hire a real VP. You need the title back.

Now you have two options. Demote and demoralize. Or fire.

Neither is good. Both were avoidable.

The honest truth: in the early days, before you've found strong product-market fit and a repeatable business model, you probably don't need a VP-level executive — and you likely can't afford one who's truly operating at that level anyway.

What you can do instead is hire a senior manager, director, or "head of." And have a direct conversation upfront: you might need to bring in a VP above them at some point, unless they prove they can execute and grow into that role themselves.

Then, if they join and can't perform at VP level, you hire above them — and you save their job in the process. If they can execute at that level, you promote them and they've earned it.

That's what we were able to do in 2017, because our investors gave us the right advice before I made an expensive mistake.

Titles are easy to give and almost impossible to take back. The kindest thing you can do for an early hire — and for yourself — is not to give them a title they haven't earned yet.