By: Mehr Sokanda
For early-stage founders, few decisions carry more weight than who they choose to build with. The composition of a founding team — and the quality of the hires that follow — shapes not just a company’s trajectory, but its culture, its resilience, and ultimately its odds of survival.
Usha Srinivasan, founder and CEO BReady.ai, has lived the full arc of startup team-building — the wins, the painful lessons, and the clarity that only comes from doing it over and over again.
Discussing her experiences in a recent workshop , she shared key insights on finding co-founders: making your first hires, building culture, and leading through the inevitable chaos of early-stage growth.
Know Why You’re an Entrepreneur in the First Place
Srinivasan opened the session with a perhaps unexpected topic: flow science and the neuroscience of peak performance. She introduced the work of author Steven Kotler, whose research on athletes in flow states — that feeling of effortless, total absorption — she draws a direct line to entrepreneurship.
Her point wasn’t abstract. When you start a business, you’re voluntarily placing yourself in a high-stakes, uncertain environment. And according to flow science, that’s exactly the kind of pressure that triggers dopamine release and drives the compulsive pull of serial entrepreneurship.
“I’m a four-time founder because I get a kick out of it- putting myself in that risky position, making mistakes, getting up again, and so on.”
That self-awareness matters. Understanding why you’re built for this — and acknowledging its psychological weight— is the first step toward leading others well. Because if you don’t understand your own relationship to risk and pressure, you’ll struggle to build a team that can handle it alongside you.
The Co-Founder Question: Go Slow, Ask Everything
For many early-stage founders, the co-founder conversation is treated too casually.
Srinivasan emphasizes that the emotional stakes are that high: “It’s just like a marriage”. The dependency is that real. And just like a marriage, things can unravel quickly if you skip the hard conversations up front.
So what should you actually be talking about? Usha identifies a set of critical questions that most founders avoid until it’s too late:
- Avoid yes-people. You don’t want someone who agrees with everything you say. A real co-founder challenges your thinking respectfully. Surrounding yourself with pure validation is comfortable but corrosive.
- Align on what success actually looks like. Srinivasan conveyed that her first co-founder for her food-tech startup was a chef who loved experimenting and building. She wanted to scale aggressively toward investment. The result? A slow, grinding mismatch.
“He just loved tinkering with things. I wanted to build something in one year to a certain level… He never had this real goal of building a big, you know, get into pre-seed investment or anything. He didn’t have that goal, and I didn’t ask him.” Six months of weekly meetings and missed deliverables later, the damage was done. So, the takeaway for founders is to not skip this conversation.
- Talk about the runway. Can your potential co-founder actually commit? Do they have savings? Are they going to disappear in six months because they can’t afford not to? These aren’t rude questions — they’re essential ones.
- Settle disagreements before they happen. How will you handle a deadlock? Who has final say on what? Srinivasan points out that
“Just because you have a 60-40 on your shareholder agreement doesn’t mean decisions are made that way. Sometimes you reach a stalemate, but nobody should have the power to veto you. Make sure you have that conversation before you need it.” Get specific about decision-making authority before you need it.
- Put everything in writing. This isn’t optional. As Srinivasan put it, “Have a proper business meeting. Put things in writing. Make sure you have an agreement on the shareholder agreement between the two of you. There’s lots of templates that can be found- Altitude Accelerator can also provide them.”
- And when things do go sideways — because they sometimes will — have a neutral intermediary ready. Srinivasan had been in shouting matches with a co-founder. A mentor helped broker the compromise. Having that third party in your back pocket before conflict erupts is far better than scrambling for one mid-crisis.
You Don’t Have to Have a Co-Founder
One of Srinivasan’s most liberating points: co-founders are not mandatory. A lot of founders bring someone on because they can’t afford to pay staff — effectively creating a co-founder out of necessity rather than genuine fit. But there’s a real difference between a co-founder and an employee. “You don’t make a co-founder without them bringing cash, right? You are sharing the burden of the business. Otherwise, they’re just employees.”
If you can run lean and solo, do it until you’re genuinely ready for the right person — not just any available one.
Your First Three Hires: Start with What You Can’t Do
Before you hire anyone, Srinivasan says, ask yourself honestly: what can I do? Because as a solo founder, you’re going to wear multiple hats — ops, sales, marketing, business development — for as long as possible. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the system.
Your first hires should fill the genuine gaps, not just feel exciting. Srinivasan runs a not-for-profit AI-enabled talent platform and is not a coder. Tech is her bottleneck, so that’s where she focused. For you, it might be marketing, finance, or program development. The key is honest self-assessment before you spend a single dollar.
But here’s the catch: don’t think in years. Think in 90 days.
“What you need in the next 90 days is not what you need in one year’s time or five years’ time. Ask yourself honestly — is this person needed right now? Because the hire you need today might be a completely different person than the one you’re imagining,” she says.
Startup timelines are compressed. Someone who would be transformative in year two might actually be dead weight — or simply the wrong person — in your current moment. Hire for now. Promote for later.
Common Hiring Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
Srinivasan runs through a number of traps she’s seen founders fall into repeatedly — and has fallen into herself.
- Letting personality overshadow performance. Have the same structured set of questions for every candidate. Don’t let someone’s charisma in a coffee chat substitute for actual evidence of capability.
“Sometimes it’s the introvert who couldn’t sell themselves in the room who turns out to be your best hire. Don’t let personality overshadow performance — it’s one of the easiest mistakes to make.”
- Overvaluing credentials. An MIT or Stanford degree is not a guarantee of hustle, passion, or problem-solving. Srinivasan has seen candidates from community colleges outperform pedigree hires time and again.
“Time and again, the best candidates aren’t always the ones with the most impressive degrees. It could be someone from a community college — what matters is that they understand the work, they’re passionate, they’re curious, and they’re asking the right questions. That’s the person you want.”
- Building tech before talking to customers. This one is especially common among technical founders. Srinivasan is on version three of her platform — and versions one and two were only possible because she kept engaging with both talent and employers throughout development.
“Help your customers help you build what you want.”
- Ignoring culture fit. Culture fit doesn’t mean hiring people who think exactly like you — in fact, that’s the opposite of what you want. It means hiring people whose working rhythms, communication standards, and professional values align with yours. Startups move fast. If someone has a 48-hour email response time, that’s a culture clash — full stop.
- Skipping reference checks. Hire slowly, do your due diligence.
“Don’t take shortcuts. It’s not worth it. I have unfortunately done that and have been burned because of that.”
Passion Over Everything
If there’s one hiring principle Srinivasan returns to more than any other, it’s this: hire people who are genuinely excited about the problem you’re solving.
She tells the story of a team member named Nicole, who worked with her when BReady.ai was incubating at Toronto Metropolitan University. “She would come to me bursting with ideas because she loved the solution so much that she was problem-solving right alongside me. That’s the kind of employee you want — not the one you have to keep chasing.”
Whether it’s a co-founder, a contractor, or your first full-time employee — if they don’t care about what you’re building, you’ll spend more energy managing their indifference than moving your business forward. Don’t settle.
Contracts, Tools, and Protecting Yourself
Srinivasan is practical to the core of operations. A few non-negotiables:
- Always use contracts. Even for subcontractors. Include a two-week notice clause — not to be punitive, but to give both parties enough time to transition cleanly. “Make sure everything is legally binding — don’t just email someone a Word document and hope they convert it to a PDF with a typed signature. Do it properly. DocuSign exists for a reason.”
- Keep your passwords. Sounds obvious until you lose access to your own social media accounts when someone leaves abruptly.
- Use tools wisely, not expensively. Srinivasan’s toolkit includes Pop AI for presentations, Linear for tracking tech build-outs, Buffer and Loomly for social media scheduling, and Midjourney for creative assets. Her advice: try freemium versions of everything before you pay. Ask other entrepreneurs in your community what actually works — not just what’s trending.
- Use student talent programs — but interview students like real candidates. Programs like Mitacs and Riipen can offset hiring costs significantly, but you still need to be selective. “Just because they’re paying for it doesn’t mean you have to take it.”
Building an Inclusive Team — and a Culture Worth Showing Up For
Srinivasan is candid that inclusivity isn’t a box to check before your funding pitch. It’s a strategic advantage. Sitting in Toronto — one of the most diverse cities in the world — there is no excuse for a homogeneous team.
Hiring in your own image limits your thinking, your market reach, and your resilience. With tariffs reshaping global trade, Usha notes that SMEs are now coming to her platform urgently looking for candidates with multilingual capabilities and international experience. “You should have been doing that from day one, but anyways, it’s an emergency moment, right?”
Don’t wait for a crisis to value diverse lived experience.
As for culture itself — she builds it intentionally, starting with how she runs meetings. She starts every team gathering with an emotional check-in: she goes first, shares something real, and gives others space to do the same if they want to. The result? People arrive present, not distracted. Tension dissipates. The work gets done better.
She also runs what she calls “good, bad, ugly” reporting in meetings — a format that pushes pessimists to acknowledge what’s working, and optimists to confront what isn’t. It shifts mindsets. It creates psychological safety. It makes people feel less alone.
The Leadership Standard
Srinivasan ended the session with a story that reframes what leadership actually demands. She referenced the famous photograph Vulture and the Little Girl by Kevin Carter — an image that won a Pulitzer Prize, after which Carter took his own life, haunted by the fact that he hadn’t helped the child in the photo.
It’s a visceral example, but her point is precise. Who you are during a crisis is who you are. Not in the planning documents or the pitch decks — in the moments when something goes wrong, when a contractor disappears, when a project collapses, when money is tight and the pressure is crushing. How do you treat your team then?
“The buck stops with me. Wherever I’ve worked, I say, buck stops with me. You made a mistake, we’ll deal with it after. How do you handle it on your own? That’s what leadership is all about.”
That is the standard. Not perfection. Not having all the answers. But showing up with accountability, protecting your team when it counts, and never letting the pressure turn you into someone you don’t want to be.
Building the right team is the hardest and most important thing a founder does. It doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen by moving fast. It happens through honest self-assessment, deliberate conversations, strong contracts, inclusive instincts — and the courage to keep hiring for passion over convenience, every single time.
At Altitude Accelerator, we are always looking for innovative ideas. If you are a startup founder seeking funding, expertise, and mentorship—and your business is ready for its next phase, please contact us info@altitudeaccelerator.ca or review our programs here.
