The Hire Founders Usually Make Too Late
Why comms belongs earlier in your hiring roadmap than most founders think, and how to structure it at any stage.
Among the first ten hires at almost any startup, you’ll typically find: an engineer, then another engineer, maybe a designer, and someone in people ops once the team hits a size where that stops being optional. It’s a sensible sequence. You build the product, and you build the team that supports the team.
Comms doesn’t usually show up on that list until much later - often not until post-Series B, when there’s a fundraise to announce, a press cycle to manage, or a “we need to get our story straight” moment that arrives with some urgency attached.
That sequencing makes intuitive sense. Capital is tight in the early days, product-market fit is still unproven, and it’s hard to justify a narrative specialist before you’re 100% sure you have a story worth telling. I’m not going to pretend that logic is crazy. It isn’t.
But by the time most companies hire for comms, they’ve already paid a cost they didn’t know they were paying.
The cost of waiting
You’ve already accumulated narrative debt. Two or three years of founder-written blog posts, ad hoc LinkedIn updates, and inconsistent messaging don’t just disappear when you finally hire someone to own the story. Someone now has to go back and unwind all of it, figuring out what’s actually true to the company versus what was said in a hurry before they can build anything new.
Your early hires joined because of some story, whether anyone was deliberate about it or not. Nobody joins a company with zero narrative. They join because of whatever story was in the air at the time; a tweet, a demo day pitch, something a friend said. If nobody was intentionally shaping that story, you got whatever story happened to you. Some of your first twenty hires are here because of narrative you didn’t choose.
Generic, AI-shaped positioning becomes the default. This is the flip side of the “AI slop” problem I wrote about in the previous post: when nobody owns voice and narrative early, the path of least resistance is whatever a tool generates. By the time you notice, that generic voice is baked into your website, your deck, your onboarding materials - and now it’s a time-consuming fixing task.
Your first real reputational moment usually happens earlier than you think. Not the crisis you’re picturing, and not necessarily a scandal. It could be a security incident, a viral complaint thread, or a co-founder departure that needs explaining. These things tend to show up well before Series B, and “we’ll figure out comms later” means figuring it out for the first time under pressure, with no plan and no practiced instincts.
So what do you actually do about it
In an ideal world, that looks like a full-time Head of Communications on day one. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so if that’s something you can’t spring for at this stage, there are workarounds. What actually matters is that someone is responsible for the narrative before you’re forced to be.
Freelance or project-based, for a specific moment. If you have one concrete deliverable – say, a launch announcement, a funding round, a rebrand - and no ongoing need yet, project-based work is the right scope. Hire someone to get that one thing right, learn from how they think about it, and reassess after.
Fractional, for building the foundation. This is usually the right move once you’re talking to press semi-regularly, fundraising is a recurring event rather than a one-time thing, or you’ve noticed your own messaging drifting depending on who’s writing it that week. A fractional lead (often 10 to 20 hours a week) can build the actual infrastructure: a messaging framework, a POV on how you talk about the category, media training for your executive team, a plan for the crisis you hope you never have. You get senior-level thinking without a full-time cost.
Full-time, once complexity outpaces bandwidth. The signal here isn’t a specific stage so much as frequency and complexity: multiple stakeholders who need message alignment (investors, press, customers, employees, sometimes regulators), a cadence of external moments that a fractional person can’t keep up with alone, or a narrative sophisticated enough that it needs someone embedded in the company full-time to get right. For a lot of companies, this lands somewhere around Series A to B, but the trigger should be the actual complexity of what you’re communicating, not a milestone on a slide.
The throughline across all three is to treat narrative like infrastructure (not decoration). You wouldn’t wait until Series B to think about your tech stack. The cost of an early, deliberate decision is almost always lower than the cost of a late migration, and comms is no exception.
A few of the more sophisticated Series A companies I’m seeing right now have already caught onto this, hiring for comms earlier than the old playbook would suggest. That’s a preview of where this is heading.
If this is the kind of thing you’re already thinking about at your own company, you’re ahead of most. Subscribe for more on narrative, comms, and storytelling for founders in the AI age. I’ll be back with the next one soon!
Originally published on Substack.