Before product-market fit, a company is still inventing itself - and early hires have to be willing to invent alongside the founder. SeedLegals CEO and Cofounder Anthony Rose explains why junior talent is better suited to the task.
There's a scene SeedLegals CEO and Co-Founder Anthony Rose has lived through more times than he'd like, and it always ends the same way. He hires an impressive person - a senior from a name-brand company - and a few weeks in, they turn up with some reasonable questions: What's our roadmap for the next twelve months? What are the OKRs?
"And you go: dude, I totally don't know," says Rose. "Because we make it up as we go along, and the product's running late, and the customers are screaming for a different product." The response is the same every time. "There's a ‘why did you hire me, what am I doing here?’ look in their eyes. And you just know it's going to go badly from there."
It goes badly because the hire was sold a job that doesn't exist yet. They arrived expecting a formula: a defined function, a known strategy, a thing to execute. But in an early-stage company, there is no formula. Figuring it out is the whole job.
Rose has learned this lesson the hard way. Between 2007 and 2010, he launched and ran BBC iPlayer as CTO (for which Wired UK named him "the man who saved the BBC"). During that time, the team grew to 250 people - something he wasn’t exactly prepared for. As he explains, "there weren't all these books you have now on management and lean startup". He had to learn on the job, with no playbook of his own.
He then built a string of successful startups before founding SeedLegals, a one-stop platform that helps founders manage fundraising and related legal documents. Today, a third of all early-stage SEIS/EIS funding rounds in the UK are done on SeedLegals, with over £2 billion raised through the platform. The team is made up of 150 people, servicing over 30,000 customers internationally.
Across all of it, the most expensive mistakes he's made cluster around a single misunderstanding: treating seniority as a measure of safety.
The real hiring question, he says, isn’t “who can I hire that already knows how to do the job?”. Rather, the question is whether someone can do the work that comes before the work is defined.
This is one of the key lessons Rose tried to impart to the founders he works with, especially when they’re just starting out.
The problem with early-stage senior hires
When someone is inexperienced, there is an instinct to buy experience that they can lean on. That’s why founders tend to hire seniors right off the bat. “They want to surround themselves with people who will tell them what to do and make them feel like they’re on the right track,” says Rose.
It’s a classic play to de-risk the early stages, but Rose says it very well may achieve the opposite. A senior resume feels like a win, because there’s an expectation that people who’ve worked at Amazon, Meta, and Google will import their expertise and knowledge. And while that may be true, it comes with a lot of baggage.
What actually shows up with these hires is the operating system their expertise ran on. “They're often a huge negative,” Rose warns, “because they're used to giant company structures, upward management, stakeholder management. You want none of that in your business. You don't have the time, you don't have the money, and you don't have the team to require it.”
Underneath all of it is the core mismatch. Big companies hand new hires a defined world: a function to slot into, OKRs, a roadmap, a strategy already set. Early-stage companies hand new hires a blank page. "You're winging it on all of that," Rose says. “So when the experienced hire asks for the plan and the founder doesn't have one, there’s disappointment at best, and panic at worst.”
These hires are not prepared for the metamorphosis that necessarily accompanies the early stages of a startup - and that’s the issue.
Early employees have to change - or move on
Transformation is inherent to the startup journey, but not everyone is prepared for it. This can cause growing pains for the earliest hires, who may have initially signed up for something different. At the same time, the skill that made someone invaluable at ten people can be irrelevant, or even a liability, at fifty.
Rose gives an example of a marketer who was a brilliant one-person band, but now needs to lead a team of five. "Maybe they were just a great marketing person," Rose says, "but a lousy manager.”
This is why early hiring decisions are so delicate. Founders aren’t staffing a stable organisation. They're staffing one that is actively mutating - and asking each new person to mutate with it. Senior hires, who are used to doing things in a certain way or trying to import strict structures from bigger companies tend not to adapt well.
The founder who internalises this stops asking "who's the best person for the job as it exists today?" and starts asking a harder question: who can keep becoming useful as the job refuses to hold still?
The early stage hiring solution
So if seniority is synonymous with rigidity, and early hires need to be adaptable - what's the solution? Rose's answer is unfashionable and deliberate: in the early stages, hire junior. Not as a budget compromise, but as a strategy.
Go junior - on purpose
"Intentionally hiring junior people just makes sense for early-stage companies," he says. "People who are going to be scrappy, who are going to want to turn this into a career for themselves."
The main advantage comes in their temperament. Juniors haven't yet learned what's supposed to be impossible and they want to prove themselves. By virtue of their inexperience, they are agile, adaptable, and often more creative than seniors.
"If they're young, they're going to embrace the latest technologies, whether it's marketing techniques or AI. They'll think nothing of using Claude Code or ChatGPT for everything, thinking about new agentic workflows and new ways of doing things - whereas people who've been in the industry for 20 years bring 20 years of legacy, rather than the future you want to invent."
An early-stage company is trying to create a future from scratch, and the person who arrives without fixed ideas about how things are done is, counterintuitively, the safer bet. They're not waiting for the formula. They're happy to be part of finding it.
There's a compounding benefit, too, and it cuts against the assumption that junior hires are a revolving door. Done well, Rose argues, they're the opposite. "They help shape your company while you shape them and give them a foundation for career growth."
A junior who has the opportunity to grow into a leadership role inside a company tends to stay. They often carry an allegiance that's hard to buy from someone who arrived already senior, says Rose. “The result is a team member who holds the business mission very personally. That’s something no amount of money can buy."
Two field-tested strategies for hiring the right junior
Junior resumes are nearly identical - same degrees, same handful of years, same tidy formatting. "At this stage of their career, everyone's resume looks exactly the same," Rose says. "You’re looking for potential rather than track record. How do you pick from the hundreds?"
1. Take note of the questions the candidate asks
At 150 people, Rose still personally does the final interview for every single hire, and after interviewing dozens of people, the answers can start to feel predictable. In any case, says Rose, "the most important thing is not the answers they give to my questions, but the questions they ask." These demonstrate the amount of effort someone has put into preparing for the interview - and give insight into how a person thinks.
"I've got a Wikipedia page, I'm on LinkedIn, I've got videos. If they haven't looked at that - well, why would I want someone who hasn't done the courtesy of basic research before talking to the team?" A candidate who references something specific he's said, or asks how he plans to grow the company in the age of AI, has demonstrated critical traits: curiosity, initiative, and a genuine reason for being in the room, beyond having mass-applied to 300 companies.
2. The £100 test
Rose was half-reluctant to share this particular piece of advice: "I'll have to give away my secret here," he says, "but I think my favourite question would be: how do you plan to grow the company?"
He tells the candidate to imagine they're the CEO of SeedLegals, lays out four growth strategies over about two minutes, gives them a notional £100 of budget, and asks them to allocate it across the four.
It's a deceptively rich exercise, because it tests several things at once. "Firstly, I get to see the analytical thoughts of the person." Sometimes a candidate backs a completely different strategy from the one SeedLegals is actually pursuing - and Rose likes that, because they're reasoning from scratch rather than flattering him.
What he's really screening for here is the failure mode that worries him most: jumping to conclusions. A candidate who forgets the four options might just be nervous - but they might be only half-listening because they were waiting to say their own piece. A candidate who answers with such fixed certainty that it's clear they didn't actually weigh the options is not going to be a good fit.
"Jumping to conclusions is a really bad attribute, particularly in a legal business, where our customers come to us with questions and we have to give them good advice."
The test needs to be adjusted relative to the industry and role a candidate is being interviewed for, to probe for key traits relevant to the work they’ll be doing. "Other businesses may not care about precision and logic. I do." The lesson isn't "use this exact question" - it's that the right test is one that surfaces the specific trait a company can't operate without.
One more thing the £100 question does, almost as a side effect: it reframes the whole interview. Rose isn't only assessing the candidate; he's selling them on a culture where they're expected to think, disagree, and take the initiative.
"At SeedLegals, you should never do what people tell you to do - especially if it's me telling you," he tells them, only half joking. "You should always think about what the underlying problem really is, and figure out the best solution. I have no ego on the line if you tell me, Anthony, thanks, but I've got a better solution."
For the scrappy, ambitious junior he's trying to attract, this is a taste of the agency they’ll be given in their role. If they get scared off, they were never going to succeed anyway. If they jump at the opportunity to share their thoughts, it’s a sign they’re going to thrive in the early-stage environment.
Looking ahead: How AI is changing the question of who and when to hire
For most of startup history, headcount was the big startup scoreboard. Rose believes that the proliferation of AI is going to reorder how founders hire entirely.
The scrappy junior Rose loves to hire is, not coincidentally, the same person most likely to wield AI tools well - which is perhaps the most convincing argument of all for hiring people built for a future that hasn't arrived yet. And that will have an outsize effect on how many people a founder hires.
"People used to see the number of employees as a badge of honour," he says. Saying "we're 200 people" was a flex. But this era is ending. "Now it's the opposite. It's almost more impressive to go: we're 10 people with 20 AI agents that handle marketing, lead generation, follow-up sales, and customer support."
Success is starting to be measured not in team size, but in output per person. This adds a new question to the hiring process. Before asking how experienced, comes: do I need to make this hire at all? "For each hire, you should be thinking: do I need that person now? Do I need them in the future?"
The honest answer, increasingly, might be no - or not yet. "Can I not need more customer service people by having AI customer support? Can I need fewer SDRs?" Even in engineering, if developers using AI tools are reporting large efficiency gains, the next hire might be a tool rather than a person.
"Maybe the AI replacement is a bit of a dream and not quite there yet," he allows - but ignoring it is likely to become a competitive risk, because "if you are ignoring it, your costs are going to be higher than your competitors’,” which drives up a company’s prices.
As AI becomes increasingly integral to the startup journey, every founder needs to consider its impact on their company’s growth plans. In the long term, hiring juniors will likely enable startups to run on smaller, leaner teams.
Making the jump: when it does make sense to go senior
"I’m definitely not saying hire junior people forever," says Rose. The junior-first logic is a feature of a company’s stage, not a permanent philosophy. “If you don't hire any senior people or promote within and upskill, then you end up without a proper hierarchy. That leaves you without anyone to set strategies and goals.”
The fix here is to prepare junior hires for change; train them for the job they’re going to have when the company matures. That way, the business retains key knowledge and talent that is passionate and invested - because they have been part of the growth.
Eventually, bringing in seniors from outside the company will make sense - usually once the formula has been found. The experienced hire who would have broken a company at ten people becomes exactly what it needs at a hundred. Nothing about Rose's argument is anti-experience. It's more anti-mistimed-experience. "Once your company reaches product-market fit, and you have a product your customers want and you want to scale, then hiring people who have scaled is going to help you scale faster, because they know what to do."
Our big takeaway: The question to sit with
Early hires make or break the future of a startup. Bringing in experienced seniors as a guide feels safer, but it actually stunts growth. Taking the counterintuitive route - going scrappy, going junior - is exactly the strategy that can accelerate growth.
"You're hiring people before you've discovered the formula," Rose says, "and they need to be happy to reinvent the formula for their own role - rather than people who want a defined role."
Get that wrong, and the result is an unhappy hire who feels like a victim: I've got nothing to sell, you keep changing it. Get it right, and you’ll land yourself a hire who comes back from a customer call already speccing the features that'll close the next one.
So, the question to sit with isn't "who's the most impressive person I can hire?" It's quieter, and harder: Where is my company, really? And who can do the work that this stage - not the one I'm imagining - actually demands?
