"We're too early for HR."
I've heard some version of this from almost every founder I've worked with between 10 and 50 people. It's usually said with a bit of pride, like process is something you graduate into once you're "big enough."
Here's the uncomfortable truth: you already have HR. You just don't have anyone doing it on purpose.
Every startup has comp decisions, performance conversations, terminations, and someone quietly absorbing a colleague's bad behaviour because nobody wants to be "that person" who raises it. The only question is whether those things are handled deliberately, or handled by whoever's most stressed that week.
I've watched this play out the same way, over and over, at AI and tech companies moving fast on product and treating people as an afterthought:
The offer letter that was "basically the same as everyone else's," except it wasn't, and now two engineers doing the same job are £20k apart with no defensible reason why.
The manager promoted because they wrote the best code, who has never had a single conversation about how to manage people, and is now quietly driving out your best junior hire.
The termination that felt obviously justified internally, but was never documented anywhere, and becomes a very expensive problem the moment it's contested.
The "brilliant jerk" everyone tolerates because they ship, until the three people who don't tolerate them leave first.
None of these show up on a roadmap. They show up in attrition, in Glassdoor reviews, in a legal letter, or in the six months a founder loses firefighting instead of building. By the time it's visible, it's not a cheap fix anymore.
This isn't an argument for a 12-person HR department or a policy for everything. Early HR should be lightweight: someone accountable for how people decisions get made, a few non-negotiables around pay, performance and conduct, and enough documentation that "we did the right thing" is provable, not just believed.
The founders who get this right don't treat it as bureaucracy. They treat it as infrastructure, the same way they'd never skip logging or version control just because it's "not the product."
If you're building a startup right now: HR isn't something you'll need eventually. You're doing it today, whether anyone owns it or not. The only choice is whether it's designed, or accidental.
What's the moment your team realised you'd outgrown "we'll figure it out as we go"?
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