There is a pattern that plays out with striking regularity in early-stage medical technology companies.
A founder raises capital, signs the term sheet, and then begins thinking seriously about hiring. The
problem is that by this point, the budget for talent has already been fixed, and in many cases, it is
nowhere near what the market actually demands.
This is not a rare edge case. It is one of the most common and costly mistakes made by founders at the
pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages, and it starts long before the first recruiter is ever called.
The Budget Problem Nobody Talks About Before the Round
When founders are putting together their funding applications, the people plan is rarely treated with
the same rigour as the product roadmap or the go-to-market strategy. Compensation data for specialist
talent in medtech and digital health is not easy to find, and most founders are not hiring experts. So
they do what seems reasonable: they ask a few contacts, get a rough sense of market rates, and build a
number into their application based on that estimate.
Underfunded people plans derail medtech and digital health startups.
The challenge is that those estimates are almost always inaccurate. Specialist roles in medtech sit at
the intersection of deep technical expertise and a highly regulated industry. The talent pool is smaller
than in general technology sectors, the skill sets are harder to source, and the compensation
expectations reflect that scarcity. What a founder hears from a well-meaning colleague in a different
sector, or even from someone within the industry who last hired two years ago, can be significantly
removed from current market reality.
The result is that founders arrive at the recruitment stage with a budget that simply does not match
what credible, experienced candidates in these fields are expecting. The gap is sometimes modest.
Often, it is substantial. Either way, it creates a problem that no amount of enthusiasm or equity can
fully bridge.
The Scramble and What It Actually Costs
Compounding this is the timing of when recruitment becomes a priority. Running an early-stage
company is an exercise in managing competing urgencies. Product development, regulatory
navigation, investor relations, commercial partnerships: all of these demand attention simultaneously.
Talent strategy, despite being foundational to everything else, tends to get pushed back until the
pressure becomes impossible to ignore.
The high cost of reactive hiring in early-stage companies.
By the time it does, there is usually a deadline attached. Investors have agreed to fund the company on
the basis of a set of milestones, and those milestones require specific people to deliver them. The
founder is now in a position where the hiring needs to happen quickly, the budget may already be
misaligned with the market, and there is no time to conduct the kind of thorough, considered search
that roles of this complexity genuinely require.
What follows is a scramble. The instinct in that situation is to move fast, and moving fast in
recruitment means narrowing the candidate pool, compressing due diligence, and often hiring the first
available person who broadly fits the brief rather than the best person the market has to offer. That
hire may work out. Sometimes it does. But the risk of a misaligned hire at this stage of a company’s
growth is significant, both in terms of the direct cost of replacing someone and the indirect cost of lost
momentum at a critical juncture.
The founders who find themselves in this position rarely saw it coming. The scramble is the visible
symptom of a planning gap that opened up much earlier in the journey.
Getting Ahead of the Problem Before It Starts
The most effective intervention is also the simplest one: treat talent strategy as a funding input, not a
post-funding task.
Talent strategy: Fund it early, succeed sooner.
Before a funding application is finalised, founders should be working with people who have current,
granular data on what specialist talent actually costs in their specific geographies and disciplines. That
means understanding not just compensation benchmarks but also the practical realities of the talent
landscape: how many candidates with the required profile are typically active in the market at any one
time, where concentrations of particular skill sets tend to sit geographically, and whether relocation or
remote arrangements need to factor into the people plan.
This kind of intelligence changes the shape of a funding round. A founder who goes into a pitch with
accurate, evidence-based projections for their hiring costs is in a fundamentally stronger position than
one who has relied on guesswork. The numbers are defensible, the milestones are achievable, and
when the investment lands, the path to executing on the people plan is clear rather than complicated.
It also changes what happens after the round closes. When the budget is right, recruitment moves at
the pace it needs to move. There is no painful renegotiation with the market, no compromise on
candidate quality, and no last-minute scramble to fill roles that should have been planned months
earlier.
This is precisely why a free pre-funding consultation is now offered to early-stage founders in
medtech, biotech, and digital health. The goal is straightforward: to give founders the accurate market
data they need to build a realistic people plan into their funding application, before the numbers are
locked in. Compensation benchmarks, talent availability, geographic distribution of skill sets, realistic
timelines for hiring: all of this can be mapped out in advance, at no cost, so that founders are not left
navigating the gap between expectation and reality once the investment is secured.
The Best Time to Think About Talent Is Earlier Than You Think
The companies that build well at the early stage are rarely the ones that move the fastest after funding
closes. They are the ones that did the thinking before the round, asked the right questions before the
application was submitted, and treated their people plan with the same seriousness as their product
and commercial strategy.
Talent: Plan early, build strong, succeed sooner.
Talent is not an operational detail to be sorted once the money is in the bank. It is a strategic asset that
shapes whether a company can deliver on what it has promised. Getting the foundations right, starting
with an honest, data-driven view of what the market looks like, is one of the most valuable things a
founder can do. And in most cases, it costs nothing except the willingness to ask the question early
enough.
