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Our First Five Hires at Luma Health

I was having a conversation with my father about how people at startups often say “I was employe X at such and such company”. It got me thinking who were our first few hires and what were their roles. So I pulled the data for our conversation and I thought I’d share it.

We use Zenefits as our HR system and it presents two views: active employees and all employees. The difference in the two views shows how startup hiring and employment is a very fluid based on the needs of the company as it scales.

All Employees

  1. Marketing, part time
  2. Account Exec
  3. Sales Director
  4. Account Exec
  5. Account Exec

You may find it unusual that we didn’t have any engineers in the first five hires. For us at Luma, our engineering at the beginning was done by me and by a friend who was working as a contractor at the beginning of the company.

Most of the original hires were various sales folks. We had just raised our seed round and the product was ready enough to start selling, so we started hiring sales people. It took us a while to figure out who we wanted and our Sales Director came on board and helped figure that out for us. Most of the hires through that period were in the sales world.

Active Employees

  1. Head of Engineering
  2. Customer Success Manager
  3. Account Exec
  4. Business Analyst
  5. Customer Success Manager

Our current active employees look pretty much what’s you’d expect at a VC backed company, but perhaps a little light on engineering. We optimized as we went for revenue generation so there are a lot more heads in the revenue roles (sales and customer success). After we raised our A round, we started hiring more heavily in engineering and also extended the engineering team pretty significantly with contractors.