At the Seed stage, your pitch deck was your product, and your passion was your sales strategy. You wore every hat because you had to. But you’ve just closed your Series A, and the game has fundamentally changed. You’re no longer just building a cool engineering project; you’re building a commercial engine. And that means making your first sales hire.
If you remain the primary salesperson for your company, you will become the single biggest bottleneck to your own growth. The question isn’t whether you need help. It’s how to hire someone who can carry the torch without burning the house down.
That’s why the first role we see founders hire for is an experienced business development lead. It’s a good move. But, as with most hires, the devil is in the details.
What Your First Sales Hire at Series A Should Look Like:
Building a sales function is how you create a steady pipeline and a predictable revenue stream. The key is setting your first hire up to succeed. It’s easy to be impressed by years of experience and big industry names. But you can end up hiring someone who isn’t up for the challenges a startup like yours will face. In our experience, two things are more important than the resume:
Scrappiness Over Seniority & Government Expertise
Most space companies want the safety of government contracts. So founders often aim high, hiring a BD director or VP from a large company who knows federal compliance inside out. On paper, this makes sense, but the risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to space startups.
If you hire for regulatory know-how alone, you could end up with someone who understands the process but can’t build you a pipeline. Navigating government bureaucracy isn’t the same skill as hunting for new business. And someone used to a team, bid writers, and a recognizable brand will struggle without that infrastructure.
You need someone with tenacity, some government exposure, and enough technical understanding to be taken seriously. A lot of early deals closed because you could talk to prospects engineer to engineer, and your first sales hire needs to do the same while building the sales function from scratch. Pair that with strong commercial instinct and enough government understanding to navigate the process, and you’ve got yourself a winning sales hire.
As Index Ventures put it in their startup handbook Scaling Through Chaos, “grit and a growth mindset are more important than fancy but established brand names.”
Grit and a growth mindset are more important than fancy but established brand names.
Startup Instinct Over a SaaS or Prime Resume
Founders tend to hire from one of two pools: aerospace primes, or fast-growth consumer tech. Both of these come with their own problems. Someone from a consumer-tech company is used to things moving quickly. Space doesn’t work like that. Everything takes longer. Parts show up late, and you can’t rush things. Someone from a prime has the opposite problem: all red tape, and no startup instinct. What you want is someone in between, who knows the tech but can still build from scratch. When you’re sizing up a track record, don’t take their word for it. Ask your talent partner to verify it by checking publicly available company records. Contract wins in space are announced publicly, so it’s easy to confirm who’s actually closed deals.
Your First Sales Hire in Practice: A SpaceX Example
In our experience, the best sales people in a startup often come from a technical background. In 2002, Gwynne Shotwell was the 11th person hired into the company, joining as VP of Business Development. She trained as an engineer, but she could also sell. She went on to become President and COO. Her combination of technical credibility and commercial instinct is what you should be aiming for. But the commercial hire you need is often more junior than you’d expect because the right person will grow with you and mold to your evolving culture.
How to Hire and Retain Your First Sales Role
The mission is not enough. Don’t forget to sell the opportunity. Remember that this talent is in high demand, so you are in the hot seat too. The mission helps, but it takes more than that to win someone over. It’s worth treating the hiring process as a sales process in its own right.
Define the Function Before the Title
Before you start selling the opportunity, it’s important to be clear about what the role needs to do. Generating pipeline, closing enterprise contracts, building go-to-market from scratch, managing government relationships… each of these will require a different kind of person. A job description that’s not clear can cost you months of runway and wasted money.
Move Quickly
In this market, speed is everything. Founder-led searches for senior roles tend to drag on for months and eat up time you don’t have, and the best people won’t wait around. That’s why working with a specialist with access to the talent you need is crucial to securing the best sales hires in space.
Offer a Competitive Package
Think about what you can offer. You can’t promise a large commission plan yet, so lean on what a startup does have. Most of the startups we work with lead with equity and stock options, flexibility, and the chance to build and own a sales function from the ground up. For the right person, the opportunity to shape the department is the real draw.
Give Your Sales Person Enough Time
Finally, don’t expect traction overnight. The person you hire is building your sales function from scratch, with no playbook. That takes time, and space makes it slower still, because government sales cycles are long and relationships are built over months, not weeks. Hire someone used to scaling what already exists, and you’ll both get frustrated quickly.
The Takeaway
Your first commercial hire isn’t about finding the most impressive name on paper. It’s about hiring for the company you are today, and the person who can build what you need next. One of the greatest advantages of partnering with a specialized talent firm is that they look at the macro-dynamics of the entire market, not just the passive stack of resumes sitting in your applicant tracking system.
They can immediately help you differentiate between a genuine talent shortage and an over-scoped JD that is simply asking for the impossible. Get crystal clear on the outcomes you need to achieve first. Once you do, the ideal hire becomes impossible to miss.