Michael Batko on why your first hire isn't an engineer anymore
“Fire 5 to 10 percent of your team every year, or you're not being ambitious enough.”
The episode
The first guest on Building Tech Teams is Michael Batko. He spent eight years running Startmate, backing more than 240 startups and watching them scale, and now builds AI-native companies at batko.ai (https://batko.ai/) and Hourglass AI (https://thehourglass.ai/).
James and Michael get into what the first hire looks like when building is nearly free, why senior engineers matter more rather than less, and how a traditional company actually goes AI-native without breaking production. It is a practical, no-theory conversation about the work itself.
What we get into
- Why the first hire flipped from engineer to go-to-market, and what that means for founders.
- The case that AI makes senior engineers more valuable, as the orchestrators who hold the whole thing together.
- How a person, then a whole company, becomes AI-native, and the AI policy that has to sit beside the company brain.
- Attitude over skill, hungry over proven: Michael's hiring philosophy, and where the mid-level squeeze actually hits.
- Why teams get smaller, the product-manager-to-engineer ratio breaks, and people management becomes the skill AI cannot touch.
- The real limit on the one-person company, and why Michael is hiring humans again.
Lines worth keeping
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“Fire 5 to 10 percent of your team every year, otherwise you're not being ambitious enough. Which is really hard, because nobody wants to fire people ever.”
“The cost of building came down so low that the first few hires have completely flipped. You want go-to-market before you want an engineer.”
“Throw in one agent doing 100 things and it keeps breaking. Have one agent do one thing incredibly well. It's like restructuring your team.”
“Skills get you 70 percent of the way. Get the right attitude and the right motivators in, and they'll learn the rest.”
“I have 10 desktops open and every one is a Claude conversation. That's my context limit. So I'm hiring people again, to scale me further.”
Why it matters
If you build or hire into an Australian tech team, this is the shape of the next two years: smaller teams, flipped first hires, and senior judgment as the moat.
Chapters
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- Cold open: fire 5 to 10 percent a year
- Welcome, and why Michael is guest one
- The first hire has flipped to go-to-market
- Why senior engineers matter more, not less
- The 10x engineer is real now
- AI-native from scratch vs retrofitting a traditional company
- The orchestrator: the role that brings AI together
- How a person, then a company, becomes AI-native
- The AI policy that sits beside the company brain
- Quick wins, process mapping, and dictation
- Your first 5 to 10 hires: attitude over skill
- Team sizes, layoffs, and AI washing
- Why teams shrink and the PM-to-engineer ratio breaks
- The mid-level squeeze, and people management as the moat
- Agents vs humans, and the limit of the one-person company
- Loneliness, inspiration, and why fresh eyes still matter
- The fear: white-collar work in the age of AI
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