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Insight
Early-stage founders often face a choice: hire a founding engineer (or work with a founding engineer pod) versus engaging an agency. This is an objective comparison of tradeoffs, not a sales pitch. Both models work—the question is which fits your stage, constraints, and goals.
Written by Aravind Srinivas, early engineer at Rupa Health and Founder & CEO of HyperNest Labs. This article reflects public information and operator perspective—no speculation on confidential details.
Table of contents
A founding engineer operates like an early employee: they own product surfaces end-to-end, write documentation, mentor juniors, and participate in roadmap decisions. They join your Slack, attend standups, and feel like part of the team—not an external vendor.
A founding engineer pod (like HyperNest Labs) provides a small team of senior ICs plus a tech lead who can act as fractional CTO. The pod embeds directly in your rituals and tooling, shipping features that feel indistinguishable from in-house work.
Key characteristics:
Agencies typically provide project-based or retainer-based services with clear scopes, deliverables, and timelines. They often have specialized teams (design, frontend, backend, QA) and can handle larger, well-defined projects.
Key characteristics:
You're in 0→1 or 1→10 phase:
When you need someone who can own ambiguous scopes, make architecture decisions, and ship features that evolve with customer feedback. Founding engineers excel at building the first version of something, not just implementing a spec.
You need to hire your first 5–10 engineers:
Founding engineers can help design hiring loops, interview candidates, and onboard new hires into a clean codebase. They transition knowledge smoothly when you're ready to bring everything in-house.
You want embedded partnership, not handoffs:
If you need someone who joins investor calls, updates board docs, and co-owns outcomes—not just delivers features and moves on.
Examples: Rupa Health (fractional CTO during scaling), Earn Life (founding pod for 0→1), EatCookJoy (rebuild after cyberattack).
You have a well-defined project with clear scope:
Agencies excel when you can write a detailed spec, set a budget, and expect predictable deliverables. Think: "Build a mobile app for iOS and Android with these 12 screens" rather than "Help us figure out what our product should be."
You need specialized skills for a short period:
If you need a dedicated design team, QA specialists, or mobile developers for a specific project, agencies can provide that specialization without long-term commitment.
You have an internal team that can manage the relationship:
Agencies work best when you have a PM or tech lead who can write clear specs, review deliverables, and coordinate handoffs. If you don't have that capacity, the agency model can create more overhead than value.
Many successful startups use both models at different stages:
The key is clarity: founding engineers own strategy and core product; agencies own well-scoped deliverables.