G&A Roles at an Early Startup

You don’t need full-time G&A roles as your first 10 hires in an early stage startup. There is not enough work at that stage and you are better served outsourcing these roles or doing it yourself. For example, you can hire an external bookkeeper but run payroll yourself using easy self-serve tools like Gusto or Rippling, you can hire a lawyer to write contracts but handle payments yourself using Stripe.

It is very tempting to hire for G&A roles because it feels like “real businesses” have them. While true, the early days of a startup have more important priorities like building the product and finding the first few customers, every dollar and each hire is crucial. That’s why founders generally prefer software tools to give them additional leverage to inexpensively cover more ground until it makes sense to build out the function.