First Hire at a Startup, Part 1 — 5 Lessons From My First 17 Months at nestermind
I joined an early-stage Swiss PropTech startup on December 27, 2024 — no warm-up, no job description, straight into a Pre-Seed round. Here's what building as employee number one actually taught me.
The short version
Five lessons from 17 months as nestermind’s first hire:
Startup intensity only makes sense once you live it. You stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in outcomes.
The first-hire role isn’t a title — it’s whatever the company needs that week. Your real job is to connect the dots no specialized team exists to own yet.
Execution creates clarity faster than planning. You learn by shipping, not by waiting for perfect information.
Operations are the hidden foundation of growth. A scalable product with non-scalable processes is a mismatch — and mismatches eventually break something.
Customers buy outcomes, not software. The product is only the vehicle.
The throughline under all five: the most valuable thing a startup teaches you is how to build in ambiguity.
Ciao e benvenuti 😊
Seventeen months ago, I became the first hire at nestermind — an early-stage Swiss PropTech. At the time, I thought I was joining a software company. Looking back, I joined something more complex: a company still trying to find its place in the market while building the systems, processes, and relationships needed to grow — all at the same time.
That distinction matters, because startups are easy to misread from the outside. People see product launches, customer wins, fundraising announcements, growth milestones. What they rarely see is the constant adaptation behind the scenes. Every week brings new information, new constraints, new problems to solve.
A first hire — employee number one, before any department exists — sits in the middle of all of it. Over 17 months I’ve worked across sales, accounts management, customer success, customer support, operations, partnerships, enterprise conversations, and fundraising discussions, (and more recently, Vibe Coding 😁). Most of it was never in a job description. It simply became necessary as the company evolved.
Here’s the core of it: being the first hire isn’t about filling a role. It’s about helping build the company while the company is still figuring out what it wants to become.
These are the five lessons that shaped how I think about startups, execution, and the operator journey.
Lesson 1: Startup intensity only makes sense once you live it
I started on December 27, 2024. At that exact moment, nestermind was in the beginning of its Pre-Seed round. Imagine joining a company when the founders are pitching, negotiating, and fighting for the resources to make the vision real. There’s no time to ease in. You learn on the move.
In traditional companies, responsibilities are well defined and work fits inside systems that already exist. In an early-stage startup, many of those systems don’t exist yet — you’re building them while serving customers, improving the product, and trying to create momentum. So the work rarely stays inside fixed hours. Even after closing the laptop, part of your attention stays with a customer conversation, an open question, an opportunity that needs a fast reply.
Over time, the line between “my responsibilities” and “the company’s responsibilities” fades. You stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in outcomes. The question stops being does this belong to my role? and becomes does this help the company move forward?
It’s intense. And it’s exponential.
Lesson 2: The first-hire role isn’t a title — it’s whatever the company needs that week
I wasn’t joining as a developer. I wasn’t writing code. My role was everything else — sales, operations, jumping into client conversations, making sure nothing fell through the cracks.
And out of everything on the list — processes to set up, product to shape — one thing came first: picking up the phone. Cold calling. Because in the early days of a startup, nothing creates traction faster.
Early-stage startups don’t have the luxury of specialized departments. Until those teams exist, someone has to connect the dots between them. First hires become those connectors. The people who thrive here aren’t the ones who need perfectly defined responsibilities — they’re the ones who can create clarity when clarity doesn’t yet exist.
Lesson 3: Execution creates clarity faster than planning
Before joining a startup, I believed clarity was something you achieved before taking action. Today I see it the other way around.
Take this newsletter. When I started Vestingnotes, I never wrote content weeks in advance. I never planned today what I’d publish in three or four weeks.
The same is true inside nestermind. Many of our most important decisions were made before we had complete certainty. Not recklessly — but with the understanding that waiting indefinitely for perfect information carries its own risk. Startups compete on learning speed, and often the fastest way to gain clarity isn’t more analysis. It’s action:
Launch. Observe. Gather feedback. Adjust. Repeat.
Progress rarely comes from finding the perfect plan. It comes from continuously improving an imperfect one.
Lesson 4: Operations are the hidden foundation of growth
When people talk about startup growth, they usually mean product, customer acquisition, or fundraising. Operations get far less attention — yet they quietly shape almost everything.
And here’s the part nobody warns you about: operations never sit still. The CRM is only the beginning.
You set up a CRM. Then more customers come. Then even more. So you add a customer support system to keep up. Then you realize those two systems don’t talk to each other — so now you’re solving integrations. Then internal communication: how exactly do we use Slack so nothing gets lost? Then accounting. Then invoicing. Then ten other things you didn’t see coming. Every problem you solve quietly sets up the next one.
But underneath all of it, the question is always the same one:
If I’m on the other side of the world, how does a piece of information I’m holding reach the right team — asynchronously — so that everything keeps moving forward, correctly, without me in the room?
That’s what operations actually is. Not tools for the sake of tools. It’s building a system where information flows to the right place on its own, so the company keeps running whether or not any single person is online.
That’s also where scalability becomes real. You can have a scalable product — but if your processes can’t carry information without you, you’ve just built a bottleneck with your own name on it.
The hard part of growth is turning what lives in your head, in scattered Gmail threads and Drive folders named after clients, into systems that work while you sleep. That transition doesn’t make a company less entrepreneurial. It’s what lets it grow without breaking.
Lesson 5: Customers buy outcomes, not software
Customers rarely buy software because they’re excited about software. What they actually want is a better outcome — to save time, reduce friction, gain visibility, simplify a workflow. The product is just the vehicle that gets them there.
I see this most clearly in real estate, which moves carefully for good reason. Most professionals work with processes that have been in place for years, sometimes decades. They’re stable, predictable, and they get the job done. And precisely because those processes have always worked, introducing something new creates friction. People don’t resist innovation because they dislike it — they resist because they’re still building the structure needed to make change sustainable.
That reframes everything. The conversation moves from features to value — from what the software does to what the customer becomes capable of doing because of it. Get that wrong and even a great product stalls. Get it right and you’re no longer selling software. You’re selling time back to someone who never had enough of it.
The meta-skill: learning to build in ambiguity
If one lesson connects the other four, it’s this: startups teach you how to move forward without perfect information.
You learn to decide despite uncertainty. You learn to adapt when your assumptions turn out wrong. You learn to operate when the environment changes faster than expected. And most importantly, you learn that ambiguity isn’t an obstacle to progress — it’s often the environment in which progress actually happens.
The ability to build, execute, and keep momentum despite uncertainty might be the single most valuable thing an early-stage startup develops in you.
FAQ: Being the first hire at a startup
What does a startup first hire do? A startup first hire typically works across many functions — sales, operations, customer success, accounts management, partnerships, product feedback — and the role evolves as the company grows. In practice, the first hire often acts as a connector between functions that don’t yet have dedicated teams.
Is being the first employee at a startup worth it? For people who value ownership, fast learning, and rapid growth, the experience can accelerate a career significantly. The trade-off is real: more uncertainty, more ambiguity, and more responsibility than a defined role at a larger company.
What skills are most important for startup operators? Adaptability, communication, problem-solving, execution, prioritization, and relationship building. The common thread is the ability to create clarity and make progress before perfect information exists.
How is startup life different from working at a large company? Large companies generally offer defined roles, established systems, and predictable processes. Startups ask you to build the systems while executing inside a changing environment at the same time.
What is an ownership mindset in startups? Taking responsibility for outcomes rather than limiting yourself to the tasks in a job description — proactively spotting problems and helping solve them, regardless of whose “job” it technically is.
Why is execution so important in startups? Because uncertainty is high and resources are limited, startups learn primarily through action. Consistent execution generates feedback and insight that planning alone can’t produce.
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Cheers,
Jona