Optimize Startup Team Composition and Hiring

Team Composition Analysis is a skill for designing team structures, hiring plans, compensation strategies and equity allocation for early-stage startups, from pre-seed through Series A. Its overview is to build the right team at the right time with appropriate compensation and equity, planning role-by-role hiring aligned with revenue milestones, budget constraints and market benchmarks.

It lays out team shape by stage:

• Pre-Seed (0-$500K ARR): 2-5 people, made up of 2-3 founders, possibly a first engineer, and contract design and marketing. Focus is building and validating product-market fit.
• Seed ($500K-$2M ARR): 5-15 people, with an engineering lead plus 2-3 engineers, a first sales hire, a product manager and a marketing or growth lead. Focus is scaling the product and proving repeatable sales.
• Series A ($2M-$10M ARR): 15-50 people, split roughly Engineering 40%, Sales and Marketing 30%, and Customer Success, G&A and Product at 10% each. Focus is scaling revenue and building repeatable processes.

Role-by-role plans with salary bands follow for engineering, sales and marketing, product, customer success and G&A. For example, a Seed engineering lead is listed at $150K-$180K and a Series A VP Engineering at $180K-$250K plus equity.

Use it when working on team composition tasks or when you need guidance, best practices or checklists for planning a startup team. Do not use it when the task is unrelated to team composition or needs a different domain or tool. The salary figures are stated as US 2024 benchmarks, and the skill says to treat output as guidance, not a substitute for expert review.

The input is your stage, the functions you need now and your business goals. The skill's quick start has eight steps: identify the stage, define roles, prioritize hires, set compensation, plan the timeline, calculate budget, design the org chart and allocate equity.

On compensation, it gives base salary benchmarks by function and level, geographic adjustments (San Francisco and New York +20-30%, Seattle, Boston and Los Angeles +10-20%, Austin, Denver and Chicago +0-10%, remote or other US cities -10-20%) and a cost formula:

Total Comp = Base Salary × 1.30 (benefits & taxes) + Equity Value

Fully-loaded cost adds payroll taxes (7.65% FICA), benefits of $10K-$15K per employee and other costs of $5K-$10K, with a rule of thumb of multiplying base salary by 1.3-1.4.

On equity, founders split roughly 40-60%, 20-40% and 10-20% for the first three, with 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff. Ranges are given for early employees and for hires at Seed and Series A by level. Option pools are 10-15% at Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A, and 5-10% per round from Series B. The skill notes that investors often require pool creation before investment, which dilutes founders.

Other planning guidance covers reporting structures for each stage, span of control (first-line managers 4-8 reports, directors and VPs 3-5, CEO 5-8), full-time versus contract trade-offs, and hiring velocity. Role opening to hire ranges from 6-8 weeks for junior to 16-24 weeks for executive, and the skill advises adding a 2-3 month planning buffer. Budget guidance gives compensation as a share of revenue: 120-150% at Seed and 70-100% at Series A.

The skill points to bundled reference files rather than external tools: references/compensation-benchmarks.md for salary data by role, level and location, references/equity-calculator.md for equity sizing and dilution scenarios, examples/seed-stage-hiring-plan.md for a seed-stage SaaS hiring plan and examples/org-chart-evolution.md for org design from 5 to 50 people. Detailed examples are also in resources/implementation-playbook.md.

It is for startup founders, early operators and people leaders who need a structured starting point for who to hire, when, and at what cost and equity. The figures are ranges to adapt to your market, not fixed rules.