Alex Cooper - Why Your First Startup Hires Are Everything

​​In this episode, Alex Cooper, CEO of Relief Cardio, shares what most startup founders learn the hard way: your first few hires make or break your momentum. He breaks down how he thinks about fit, trust, and why early teams should never be more than one degree apart.

Travis: 
Welcome back to another Med Tech Snapshot podcast, the one question, one Answer medical device podcast where we bring in folks to talk about their backgrounds, their and their experiences. And with me today, Alex Cooper, CEO of Relief Cardio. 

Alex is going to take us through a little bit of a ride of what it's like to be a first-time founder and a startup, but then also navigating, you know, how do you bring in the right people and how do you move that business forward? So stay tuned. 

All right, Alex. So, you know, thinking about the startup world, I'd love to learn a little bit more about what your strategy is for hiring the right people within your startup, right. And the things that you have to go through to ensure that that individual coming in helps move the culture forward and not backwards or behind. Any thoughts on that? 

Alex: 
Yeah, I mean, your first couple hires are in incredibly critical. I mean, even if you just think of it from like a pure numbers game, if you hire two people and one of them is a poor fit, then half your team is a poor fit. And so it's honestly like a level of stress and criticality that's kind of hard to overstate. 

So, I would just say honestly, your first 1-2, maybe even 3 hires strongly encourage that it's somebody that you've worked with before, or at least know secondhand just to really make sure. 
And of course, like when you're interviewing them, you can use all the usual strategies to kind of pull out like how they work, how they handle stress, their skills, their knowledge. 

But my personal experience has been like those first few hires don't go more than 1° of separation because yeah, like it can really drag things down if you got a bad fit in the early days.