# Founding Exec Team

Help users recruit compatible co-founders, sequence early leadership hires to fill...

- Repository: https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-skills (1456 stars)
- Category: Engineering
- License: MIT
- Last updated: 2026-07-16
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill founding-exec-team -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill founding-exec-team -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill founding-exec-team -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill founding-exec-team -g -a gemini-cli -y`

## Description

Help users recruit compatible co-founders, sequence early leadership hires to fill capability gaps, and manage the evolution of the executive team as the company scales.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# Founding Executive Team Building

Design and scale the core leadership layer that drives company growth from zero to one.

Help the user with founding executive team building using insights from 15 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

## How to Help

1. **Gap Analysis** - Evaluate your current founding team's strengths and weaknesses to determine the most critical leadership hire.
2. **Equity Structuring** - Provide frameworks for distributing equity among early co-founders and late-joining partners based on long-term impact.
3. **Conflict Prevention** - Guide the use of 'founder prenups' and check-ins to surface and resolve interpersonal tensions before they scale.
4. **Scaling Transitions** - Identify when and how to replace early-stage leaders with executives suited for larger organizational complexity.

## Core Principles

### Sequence based on horsepower
From "Hiring your early team": "Over two-thirds of the companies hired an engineer as employee #1. Not a big surprise. In the rare case when an engineer wasn’t the first hire, it usually came down to the founding team having enough horsepower to build the V1."

Prioritize technical talent in your earliest hires unless the founding team already possesses the internal capacity to build the first version of the product independently.

### Impact-driven equity
From "This Week #8: Splitting equity with late-joining co-founders, favorite roadmap templates, and small changes that improve your org": "If they’re a true cofounder, would you consider giving them equity starting around 10% of the company, all the way up to a share equal to yours? For a very early stage company, we see “late-arriving cofounders” all the time. Otherwise, senior engineers/founding team would usually receive 1-5% of the company. These are all averages and situations definitely differ."

The rest: https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-skills/blob/HEAD/skills/founding-exec-team/SKILL.md