Artisan may be known for their bold “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign but the reality is every founder needs to assemble the right team if they want to scale. The fast-growing AI startup is building AI employees for sales outbound and customer engagement. This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen spoke with Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the co-founder and CEO of Artisan about the early days growing their team and the hiring mistakes that could have killed them before they got off the ground.
Making the wrong hires or filling the wrong positions are mistakes that compound quickly. They waste time, drag down morale, and often create an execution lag that can be fatal to a startup just starting to scale.
“I’ve made a lot of hiring mistakes — like, a lot within every single role,” said Carmichael-Jack. “We’ve probably hired over 100 people to have the 40 people that we have now.” But every mistake led to a valuable lesson that the founding team was able to implement going forward.
Overhiring
It’s much harder to keep a team of 50 on track and mission-aligned than it is a team of 10. “I thought that we would scale faster if I hired all these roles and built this huge team, but it actually makes it more difficult to scale,” said Carmichael-Jack.
No one on the team of an early startup should have downtime. Hires should only happen when there is too much for the team to handle.
Logo shopping
An impressive CV with experience at some of the tech giants doesn’t always signal a person who is ready to dive into a startup. The skills needed to perform well on a large well-resourced team don’t always match what’s needed to execute in a startup environment. The experience and passion of a prospective employee matters more than big-name logos on a résumé.
Hiring too senior or too junior
Someone who is too far along in their career may not be able to operate in the chaos of an early-stage startup and may expect structure that doesn’t yet exist. On the other hand, a hire who is too junior won’t have the skills to scale their function.
Being too quick to hire and too slow to fire
The hiring process should be patient and thorough, even with an impressive candidate. Meanwhile, decisive action is best when someone isn’t a good fit for the team.
“Early on, we were way too slow. So we would sit on a decision for weeks or months and not really do anything and try and help them a bit, but not really, and just float around. And it never works out when you do that,” said Carmichael-Jack. “You can tell when someone’s not working out in a role, and usually they know as well.”
Carmichael-Jack’s early mistakes are a reminder that hiring isn’t just an operational task; it’s a strategic one. The wrong hire doesn’t just slow you down; it can reshape your culture, dilute your standards, and make every future hire harder. The right ones, however, compound just as quickly.
In the end, even a company building AI employees learned the same lesson every founder eventually does: You can’t scale a company without humans — they just have to be the right humans.
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