Artisan CEO and Co-Founder Jaspar Carmichael-Jack says early-stage startups should resist hiring for scale before they have the structure to support it. In a recent TechCrunch Build Mode interview, Carmichael-Jack said Artisan has hired more than 100 people to build its current 40-person team, a sign of how quickly hiring mistakes can compound at a growing startup.
Artisan, which develops AI employees for sales outreach and customer engagement, became known for its “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign. But Carmichael-Jack’s advice to founders is more specific: hire only when the existing team has no downtime and can no longer handle the work. “I thought that we would scale faster if I hired all these roles and built this huge team, but it actually makes it more difficult to scale,” he told TechCrunch.
He also warned founders against “logo shopping,” or giving too much weight to candidates who come from major tech companies. Experience at a large, well-resourced company does not always translate to the uncertainty and pace of an early-stage startup. Carmichael-Jack said founders also need to avoid hiring too senior or too junior, since both can create problems if the person lacks the right balance of independence, experience, and adaptability.
For Artisan, the lesson is that hiring should be slower and more deliberate, while performance decisions should happen faster once a mismatch becomes clear. Carmichael-Jack said the company was previously “way too slow” to act when someone was not working out. The broader takeaway is especially pointed coming from an AI company: even startups building AI workers still depend on human judgment, standards, and team quality to scale.
