Varun Mohan, co-founder of Windsurf, calls it the "dehydrated entity" approach to hiring:
"You should only hire when the current team is genuinely underwater -- when critical work is actively being dropped."
Not when things are merely hard. Not when priorities are unclear. Not when people feel "stretched." You wait until critical work is visibly falling on the floor -- not deferred or delayed, but actively dropped.
The instinct at startups is the opposite. Fundraise? Hire. Land a few customers? Hire. Can't keep up? Hire. But this reflex leads to manufactured work, busyness instead of urgency, and the worst outcome of overhiring: people inventing tasks to justify their roles. Scarcity forces judgment. You can't do everything, so you have to decide what matters. At early-stage startups, that forced focus is almost always the right trade.
The other benefit: when you hire out of genuine necessity, the role writes itself. The team already knows what's breaking, why it matters, and what success looks like. Onboarding becomes pointed and urgent. New hires step into a fire, not a fog.
If your company doesn't feel a little dehydrated, you might already be bloated.