Why scaling a startup requires slowing down your hiring

In the early stages of building a company, founders often face pressure to expand their teams quickly. However, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the co-founder and CEO of Artisan—an AI startup building AI employees for sales outbound and customer engagement—warns that rapid hiring can backfire. Speaking on the Build Mode podcast hosted by Isabelle Johannessen, Carmichael-Jack discussed the learning curve his company faced. “I’ve made a lot of hiring mistakes — like, a lot within every single role,” said Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the co-founder and CEO of Artisan. To reach its current team of 40, Artisan has probably hired over 100 people, illustrating the high turnover and cost of early hiring mistakes.

The transition from a small group to a larger organization is rarely seamless. Carmichael-Jack noted that scaling from a team of 10 to 50 is significantly harder than expected. Many founders operate under the assumption that adding headcount accelerates growth. However, the CEO explained that he previously believed hiring for all these roles and building a huge team would help them scale faster, but found that it actually makes it more difficult to scale. Adding headcount prematurely can introduce complexity that hinders progress rather than aiding it, making alignment and execution much harder to maintain.

According to Carmichael-Jack, hiring is a strategic, not just operational, task. Making the wrong hires or filling the wrong positions are mistakes that compound quickly, wasting time, dragging down morale, and creating an execution lag. To prevent these compounding issues, he argues that the hiring process should be patient and thorough, even when facing pressure to scale. Equally important is taking decisive action when a hire is not a good fit. Carmichael-Jack admitted that in the startup’s early days, they were too slow to make decisions, often waiting for weeks or months without taking action, which never worked out. Ultimately, even for a company building AI employees, the human element remains indispensable. You cannot scale a company without humans, but success depends on assembling the right team.

Why it matters

Founders often equate headcount with growth, but this perspective highlights that poor hiring decisions create compounding execution debt that can stall a startup’s momentum.