What employee #5 actually does

When you're the first person through the door after the founders, the job description is a single line: make the thing work that nobody else is making work yet.

Some weeks that's go-to-market. Some weeks it's ops. Some weeks it's sitting on a call at 6am because the customer is in a timezone the founders can't cover.

The frontier moves

The hardest part isn't the work — it's that the work keeps changing shape. The moment you've systematised something, it's no longer the bottleneck, and you're needed somewhere with no system at all.

The job is not to be good at one thing. It's to be the person who runs toward whatever is currently on fire.

A few things I've learned building GTM & Ops from 0 across AU & NZ:

1. Ship the rough version. A live process beats a perfect plan.
2. Write everything down. Future-you (and hire #6) will thank you.
3. Stay close to the customer. Every abstraction layer you add is signal you lose.

That's it for now. More soon.