Your first hire is a subscription
You are not buying a person. You are signing up for a bill that arrives every month until one of you leaves.
- Offer
- $4,500/mo
- True cost
- $5,900/mo
- Runway before
- 5.1 mo
- Runway after
- 3.4 mo
The number on the offer letter is not the cost
A $4,500 salary is not $4,500. Add payroll taxes and mandatory contributions, a laptop amortised over two years, software seats, the share of the office they occupy, and the recruiting cost you already paid to find them. Depending on where you operate, the real number lands somewhere between 1.25× and 1.4× the salary. Budget the salary and you have quietly under-planned by a quarter.
Then there is the part nobody writes down: a hire also costs your attention. For the first few weeks, the most expensive person in the company is answering their questions. That is real, it is temporary, and it is the reason a good hire is net-negative before they are net-positive.
Ramp time is the part that kills runway
A senior engineer is productive in three or four weeks. A salesperson takes a full sales cycle — often a quarter — before you can even tell whether they work. A marketer takes as long as your slowest channel takes to give a signal.
So the question is never “can I afford their salary?” It is “can I afford their salary for the length of their ramp, and then the length of time it takes to find out I was wrong?” If the honest answer is no, the hire is not a hire. It is a bet with a deadline attached, and you should price it as one.
Hire against a bottleneck, not a wish list
The wish list version sounds like: we need a designer, we need a data person, we should probably have someone on support. The bottleneck version sounds like: sales calls are being lost at the demo because the product looks unfinished, and that is costing us two deals a month.
The first is a shopping list. The second is a job with a number attached, which means you will know within a quarter whether the hire worked. Every role you can describe as “what breaks if this stays unfilled” is a role you can evaluate. Every role you cannot is a role you are filling because the company is supposed to be bigger by now.
Two questions before you send it
- What breaks if I do not hire? If nothing breaks for three months, you have three months to keep looking, and the candidate pool is better than the one you have this week.
- Can I make payroll for them in the bad case? Not the plan — the case where revenue is flat and the round slips a quarter. If the answer is no, you are not hiring them. You are borrowing against a round that has not happened.
Neither question is about the candidate. That is the point: by the time you are excited about a person, you have already stopped asking whether the role should exist.
“Before you send the offer, look at the runway with their salary already in it. If that number scares you, the answer is not a cheaper candidate. The answer is not yet.”
Every hire in Axon is a permanent monthly line, not a one-time purchase, and the runway recalculates the moment you confirm. The office you need in order to seat them is a second bill you did not budget for — which is exactly how it works outside the game.