EP 05 - When Is The Right Moment To Invest In People?

There is a moment in almost every early-stage company where the same question comes up.

Do we really need to invest in people already?

It usually sounds practical. Cash is limited. The roadmap is full. The pressure to deliver is real. Hiring feels like something you do later when things are more stable.

I understand that thinking. I lived it. More than once.

But after years of building teams inside corporations, startups, and venture structures, I can say this with full conviction.

Unless you are building a very specific AI-driven product with minimal human dependency, investing in people early is not optional. It is the work.

People are not something you add to a business. They are the business.

I started my career in hospitality. Hotels and large restaurants teach you something very quickly. Systems only work when people do. You can design the perfect process on paper, but if the team does not understand it, believe in it, or trust each other, everything breaks during the first busy evening.

That lesson stayed with me when I moved into recruitment and later venture building.

At KPMG, I was asked to build recruitment from zero. On paper, it was an HR challenge. In reality, it was a human one. Attrition was high. Knowledge was leaking out of the organization. Managers were hiring based on gut feeling without shared standards.

We built recruitment. Then we built mobility. Then we built learning and development. Not because it looked good on an org chart, but because people needed structure, clarity, and growth to stay.

The moment those systems started working together, performance followed.

The same pattern shows up in startups, just faster and more brutally.

Early-stage companies love to talk about product-market fit. Less people talk about team fit. But team fit comes first. Without it, product market fit does not survive pressure.

When founders delay investing in people, what they are often delaying is clarity.

Clarity on roles.

Clarity on expectations.

Clarity on how decisions are made.

Clarity on what kind of behavior is acceptable when things go wrong.

Without that clarity, everyone fills the gaps with their own assumptions. That is when friction starts. Not because people are bad, but because the system is missing.

Investing in people early does not mean hiring a big HR team. It means designing the human system with the same care you design your product.

Who do we hire first and why?

What kind of mindset do we want around the table?

How do we give feedback?

How do we handle conflict?

How do we grow people instead of burning them?

These are leadership questions, not HR questions.

In venture building, I often see founders who are brilliant technically but exhausted emotionally. They carry everything themselves because they do not trust others yet. Or because they hired too fast without alignment.

That is not a personal failure. It is a system failure.

People talk about speed as if going fast means skipping structure. In reality, structure is what allows speed without chaos. The earlier you build it, the less painful it is.

I do not believe in hyper growth. It is not sustainable. For business or for people. Sustainable growth starts with a team that can actually handle the next phase.

The irony is that investing in people early often feels expensive, but fixing people problems later is always more costly. In money, in time, and in energy.

Bad hires linger.

Unclear roles create tension.

Unspoken expectations lead to disappointment.

And founders end up doing damage control instead of building.

I have also seen the opposite.

Small teams that invested early in trust, clarity, and shared values. They did not hire fast. They hired right. They talked openly. They built simple systems that worked for humans, not against them.

Those teams moved with less noise. Decisions were faster because trust was already there. When things broke, they fixed them together instead of pointing fingers.

That is what investing in people really means.

It is not about titles.

It is not about fancy policies.

It is about treating the human side of the business as real work.

In UniPrisma, we build ventures with this belief at the core. We do not throw capital at ideas and wait. We co-build. That means putting people, structure, and rhythm in place from the start.

We bring founders, operators, and investors together early. We define how we work before scaling what we build. Not because it is comfortable, but because it works.

Business is not just execution. It is organized humanity.

If you get the human system right, the rest becomes easier to solve. If you ignore it, no amount of technology or capital will save you.

So, when is the right moment to invest in people?

At the start.

Always.

Timecode:

00:00 Introduction: The Importance of Investing in People

00:17 Balancing Priorities in Different Business Models

00:27 Conclusion: HR as a Key to Success

Links:

Uniprisma: https://uniprisma.com/

Meijer & Co.: https://meijerandco.com/

Personal Website: https://www.thijmenmeijer.com/

Transcript:

So when is the right moment to invest in people? unless you are a AI first, based, platform or SaaS model, it is key to invest in people, right from the get go. Personally, I am in the headhunting business and in the venture, building business. So it's key for us to invest in people. However, when you're more into research, or when you're more into, uh, technology, you of course have to prioritize your needs, in order to accomplish your goals. but for any kind of company, investing in people, investing in HR is key to, succeed.