If you've just closed a seed round, the instinct is to hire fast. The data says don't. Carta's latest compensation report puts the median seed-stage team at four people, down from 10.3 in 2021, and Startup Muster found the average Australian startup now runs with 4.2 full-time staff, a number we wrote about back in April. A realistic seed budget covers two to four excellent hires over the next 12 to 18 months, not ten. Every one of those hires is worth more than the equivalent hire was a few years ago, and the cost of getting one wrong has gone up to match.
The median Australian seed round sat at $2.5m in 2025, according to Cut Through Venture and Folklore Ventures, flat on the year before and the only stage that didn't grow. Carta's US data shows the gap between seed and Series A has stretched to 616 days, a little over 20 months, so we tell founders to budget a seed round for at least 24 months of runway rather than the 18 everyone used to plan for. Run the maths on three or four salaried hires at $150-170k fully loaded and you're looking at $500-700k a year before tools, cloud and travel. That's most of a $2.5m round gone on payroll alone, which is exactly why each hire has to earn its place.
Team size at the point of raising sits around four to eight people, depending on whose data you use. Carta's APAC numbers put the median seed-stage company at eight employees. Either way, you're hiring into a team small enough that one bad fit changes the culture, not just the output.
Lenny Rachitsky's study of 20 top B2B companies, Canva among them, found that more than two thirds hired an engineer as employee number one, and every single one had an engineer in their first three hires. The exceptions prove the rule rather than break it. Vanta hired a compliance expert first because the founders could already build and needed the regulatory check. Segment hired support first for the same reason. The pattern underneath both is simple: hire to remove your actual bottleneck, not a role you think a "real company" should have by now.
Sales almost never shows up in the first three hires, and the advice on when it should is one of the few places the frameworks genuinely disagree. YC and Techstars both say keep selling yourself until you can hand over a written playbook, usually after a dozen or more customers closed outside your own network. Keith Rabois takes the opposite view on hiring generally: stop waiting for the "right" role to open and hire the exceptional generalist, the "barrel" who can take an idea from nothing to shipped, whenever you find them. Both are right for different problems. Be patient about the role, fast about the person.
The research backs up what we already tell clients. Generalists first, specialists only once the job itself demands excellence a generalist can't deliver, not once the headcount hits some round number. Work backward from the goal: decide what you actually need to be true in 12 months, then hire for that, not for the backlog sitting in front of you today.
The most expensive mistake we see is a good CV from the wrong place. A founder hires someone off a big, recognisable logo, pays them well above the seed-stage band, and gets someone who expects the infrastructure, process and support of a 10,000-person company. They bring real skill and the wrong instincts, and a four-person team can't absorb either. Early hires need to believe in what you're building before budget becomes the deciding factor. That only flips once you're hiring specialists for roles where the market genuinely has pricing power, AI-forward engineers right now being the clearest example.
It's also worth saying plainly: the recruiter you use for this matters more than it does later. A seed-stage mis-hire doesn't cost a company a bad quarter, it can cost it the company. Pick a recruiter on how they go to market and how they safety-check a hire, not on how likeable the pitch meeting was.
Carta's data on the first five hires' equity grants gives medians of roughly 1.5%, 0.85%, 0.5%, 0.44% and 0.34%, over a four-year vest. All five at the median uses well under 4% of the company, which is lower than most founders assume going in. Australian and New Zealand startups tend to reserve a bigger option pool than the APAC average, a median of 12.6% against 10%, and Australian staff exercise their options more often than their US counterparts, so it's worth setting the pool up properly and explaining it clearly rather than treating it as a footnote in the offer.
On cash, a strong mid-level engineer in Australia sits around $130-145k, and that's where seed-stage offers should land, close to market rather than deeply discounted for equity. Australian candidates aren't used to the US-style trade of cash for upside, and cost-of-living pressure is real for them too.
On our side, a seed-stage search runs at 14% rather than the 12% we quote for pre-seed. It's a small step up for a reason: a seed-stage hire is being measured against a tighter brief, a smaller margin for error, and a higher bar from the candidates themselves, who know exactly how competitive this market has become.
Hiring for pedigree over fit. Hiring too senior too early: a VP of Sales or a Head of People usually arrives years before the business is ready for one. Mapping only today's job instead of where the business needs to be in two years. And letting a bad hire ride out its "honeymoon period", the first three months that mask almost every real problem, because nobody wants to be the one who pulls the pin early.
Being precise about who comes in next, and clear-eyed about what each hire is actually worth to the four or five people already in the room, matters more at this size than at any other. If you want a second pair of eyes on a seed-stage brief before it goes out, that's exactly the conversation our hiring reset call is for.
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