What your first GTM hire should actually own

A founder hiring their first go to market person is usually trying to get something off their plate. Customer calls. Partnerships. Follow ups. The feeling that sales only moves when they're personally involved.

That's understandable. But the company may still be deciding who its customer is, which problem matters enough to pay for, and what it can realistically deliver. The person taking over those conversations needs permission to work on those decisions too.

That is the role I find interesting. I've worked on early partnerships at Axelar, regional GTM at Ripple, and built Printr as a cofounder. Across those settings, commercial work kept reaching back into the product, the market choice and the company's priorities.

Start with the decisions the company hasn't made

At Axelar, part of my early work was developing the value proposition and partnership pitch. There was technical infrastructure to explain. We needed to make the case for why another team should spend time integrating it.

Those are different conversations depending on who is across the table. A protocol team, a liquidity provider and an application developer can all be interested in interoperability while needing very different things from a partnership.

If the first GTM hire only has permission to deliver a fixed pitch, the company loses much of the value of those conversations. They need to be able to come back and say: this segment understands the problem but won't prioritise it; this other segment has a deadline and a workable path to adoption; this feature matters less than we thought.

I would make that part of the job description. Own the commercial recommendation, including the evidence that could change it.

Keep the first deals close to delivery

I want the person selling the first few customers to stay involved long enough to understand what happens after the agreement.

Imagine an AI company selling a workflow tool. The buyer likes the demo. The pilot starts. Then it turns out the customer's data needs work, nobody has time to evaluate the output, and the budget owner expected something different from the daily user.

A salesperson who disappears at signature may never understand why the deal failed to expand. The product team inherits a vague complaint about adoption. The next prospect hears the same pitch.

Early on, I would give one commercial owner responsibility from the first conversation through the agreed initial outcome, working closely with engineering. They don't need to do every task. They do need to know where the promise breaks.

This is also why I wouldn't choose the first hire by title alone. Some companies need a strong seller. Others need someone who can scope an integration or develop a partner channel. The hire should match the thing preventing a customer from getting value.

AI makes the hiring test more demanding

Jason Lemkin's discussion of the first sales hire emphasises deep product understanding and the ability to work around an early product's gaps. That matters even more when basic research and follow up become easier to automate.

I would let candidates use AI in a practical exercise. Give them a small set of real prospects, a product brief and a few anonymised customer calls. Ask which accounts they would pursue, which they would leave alone, and what they would need to learn before making a promise.

The interesting part is the discussion afterwards. Can they distinguish a buying signal from a convenient story? Can they spot an assumption in the AI's research? Can they explain why a technically attractive prospect might be a bad first customer?

Kyle Poyar has written about giving AI GTM systems durable context. My addition is that someone must remain accountable for changing that context when the market disagrees with it.

Make the mandate concrete

For the first ninety days, I would agree a narrow set of outputs: a customer segment we can defend, a message tested in real conversations, a few opportunities with explicit next steps, and a clear account of what prevents deployment or repeat use.

Revenue still matters. So does learning whether the revenue can be won again without a new set of exceptional promises.

At Printr, I owned product direction, partnerships and distribution alongside fundraising and hiring. I wouldn't expect every first GTM hire to take on a founder's entire workload. I would expect them to be comfortable crossing those boundaries when a commercial decision requires it.

Before hiring, I'd ask the founder to name the decisions this person can make without waiting for permission. That answer tells me much more about the role than the seniority of the title.