We didn’t start with a plan to build a team of 50+ people for Samplead.

We started with one hire.

I think that distinction matters.

Because when companies talk about entering a new talent market, we usually make it sound much more strategic than it actually feels at the beginning.

You see presentations about:

All useful.

But when you're actually the founder making the decision, the question is often much simpler:

Can I find one really good person there?

That was basically the beginning of our relationship with Samplead.

They needed their first hire.

We handled the recruitment and selection through HiresLink, and then continued supporting the team as it grew.

One person became another.

Then more.

Eventually, that first hire had turned into a team of 50+ professionals across Latin America recruited with us.

Looking at the number now makes it sound obvious.

It wasn’t obvious when there was only one.

I think founders underestimate how much information they take from one person.

Imagine you're hiring in a country or region you've never hired from before.

Then one person joins.

And suddenly the abstract market becomes a human being sitting in your Slack.

They join meetings.

They deliver work.

They communicate with your US team.

They understand the company.

Maybe they outperform expectations.

And something changes.

The question is no longer:

“Should we hire in Latin America?”

It becomes:

“Who should we hire next?”

That is a completely different conversation.

Not because employee #1 does more work than everyone who comes after them.

Obviously not 😂

They matter because they change the perceived risk.

Before that first hire, every assumption about a new market is theoretical.

After a good first hire, you have evidence.

This is a huge part of international hiring that I think gets missed.

Companies don't scale into new markets because someone showed them a salary comparison.

They scale because the first experience was good enough that they trust the market.

With Samplead, that trust compounded.

One successful hire made the second one easier.

The second made the third less risky.

Eventually you stop treating LATAM as an experiment and start treating it as one of the places where your company builds teams.

That's a very important transition.

We recently looked at this from another angle when building the HiresLink YC Talent Map.

The map tracks 3,707 YC companies and more than 215,000 indexed public professional profiles.

Among the YC companies where we could observe workforce data, roughly 23% already showed at least one team member in Latin America.

But the interesting part wasn't the overall number.

It was what happened as companies got bigger.

Among YC companies with 1–10 employees, only around 8% showed LATAM talent.

At 11–50 employees, it jumped to 29%.

At 51–200 employees, it was around 50%.

And among companies with 1,000+ employees, around 70% had LATAM talent represented.

That doesn't prove every company followed the Samplead pattern.

But I think it shows something interesting.

The first cross-border hire is still unusual.

Once companies become comfortable building distributed teams, it becomes much more normal.

The barrier often isn't talent.

It's trust.

A lot of nearshore hiring gets sold around cost.

And obviously cost matters.

Our latest LATAM Talent Intelligence Report shows meaningful differences between US compensation and LATAM compensation across engineering, sales, operations, finance and other roles.

Founders notice that.

CFOs definitely notice it 😂

But I don't think cost is what turns one hire into 50.

If the first person is 50% cheaper and terrible, you're probably not hiring the second person.

If they're more affordable and really good, that's completely different.

Now you start discovering the other advantages.

US working-hour overlap.

Strong English.

Large talent markets across Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere.

People with experience working inside US startups.

The ability to hire across functions instead of only engineering.

Eventually you're not looking at the region purely as a cost-saving strategy.

It becomes part of your talent strategy.

That's a much stronger position.

This is the uncomfortable part.

The first hire can compound negatively too.

I've seen founders say things like:

Or:

And sometimes what that actually means is:

We hired one person.

They weren't the right person.

Therefore we concluded there was something wrong with a talent market containing millions of people 😂

It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that.

But companies do this all the time.

The first hire gets interpreted as evidence about the whole market.

That is why I think the vetting bar should actually be higher, not lower, when you're making your first hire somewhere new.

You aren't only hiring someone for a job.

You're testing a hypothesis.

Can this market become part of how our company builds teams?

That's one reason we've spent so much time refining how we screen people at HiresLink.

Our current vetting process looks at English, cultural fit, technical capability when relevant, career expectations and how somebody actually communicates, not only what keywords appear on the CV.

For hire #27, you already have context.

For hire #1, you need much more confidence.

This is another mistake I see.

A founder says:

Okay.

Where? 😂

Argentina isn't Colombia.

Colombia isn't Mexico.

Brazil is its own enormous market.

Compensation changes.

Talent supply changes.

English levels change.

Certain roles are much deeper in particular countries.

That's why before entering a new market today, I would spend much more time understanding the actual talent data before opening a role.

We've started publishing a lot of that openly through our salary and role benchmarks, because I think founders should be able to answer basic questions before speaking to a recruiter.

That research helps.

But eventually research has to become a person.

And that's where the real learning starts.

Looking back, the interesting thing about Samplead isn't the 50+ number.

Obviously I'm proud of it.

But the better lesson is how little information we had when there was only one.

Nobody knew at the beginning whether that first hire would eventually become a large LATAM team.

You almost never know that.

Founders like to think they make these big strategic decisions:

Usually reality is less dramatic.

You hire somebody.

They work out.

So you hire somebody else.

Then a team lead gets comfortable managing remotely.

Then another department asks if they can hire there too.

Then someone leaves in the US and instead of automatically replacing them locally, somebody asks:

That's how a market becomes part of the company.

Very slowly.

And then suddenly all at once.

I wouldn't begin by asking:

That's too far ahead.

I'd ask:

Something important enough that success matters.

But clear enough that you can actually judge whether the person is good.

Then I would be unusually careful about that first hire.

Not because the person needs to be perfect.

Because that person will teach your company what to believe about the next 49.

Samplead's first hire didn't magically create 50 more jobs.

But it did something almost as important.

It made the second hire feel less risky.

Then the third.

Then the tenth.

That's how trust compounds.

Dor Vardi from Samplead once described the experience pretty simply:

At the time, it was one candidate.

Looking back now, that sentence means something different to me.

Because sometimes the first hire isn't just filling an empty seat.

It's opening a market.

See you next week,

Julian

PS — if you're thinking about making your first hire in LATAM, you can explore the roles we currently recruit for or use our LATAM Talent Intelligence Report to compare salary, supply and hiring conditions before deciding where to start.