Recruiting a founding team before there's a company
The pitch that convinces senior operators to join at day zero.
The first three hires into a studio venture join something that has a product, customers, and funding — but no name on the door, no brand, and no track record. That is a genuinely hard pitch, and the instinct to oversell it is the main way studios lose good people in year one.
Lead with what is already true
Senior operators have heard every version of the visionary pitch. What moves them is evidence: signed pilots, a working product they can click through, and a funded runway with a date on it. We open with those three artefacts and let the vision come second.
"The strongest recruiting asset a studio has is boring: a real customer, a real product, and money in the account."
Be specific about the trade
A founding engineer at a studio venture takes less equity than they would at a garage-stage startup, and carries much less existential risk. We say that plainly, with numbers, in the first conversation. Candidates who want the lottery ticket self-select out, which is the correct outcome for everyone.
Sell the bench, then get out of the way
The studio bench is a real perk — design, data, and infrastructure support that a five-person company could never afford. It is also a dependency, so we put an explicit end date on it. By month nine the venture team owns everything, and we have found that saying so up front is what makes senior people believe the rest of the pitch.