It is NOT worth hiring a few average people just for one brilliant person. First of all &quot;brilliant&quot; person is overrated, unless we&#x27;re talking about hiring someone at a CTO level. One could be brilliant yet a perfect disaster for the company if he doesn&#x27;t fit in, not to mention many other factors. Also you seem to think mediocre employees don&#x27;t hurt the company but mediocre people hire&#x2F;attract less than mediocre people, who in turn hires&#x2F;attracts people even worse, and so on. As a startup you don&#x27;t have that luxury. And the company culture goes to shit. I would never make that decision. I&#x27;ve had both cases, one of the employees was a brilliant guy but was lazy, and he fucked up the company culture by acting as a &quot;role model&quot;. Soon everyone in the company started acting like him. I&#x27;ve also hired someone who didn&#x27;t really fit in and was passive aggressive, and it was hard to communicate with him. Thinking back it wasn&#x27;t because he was not talented, but because he just didn&#x27;t care much (This is equivalent to having a mediocre employee). Because of this the entire team had hard time making decisions. When your team is small even one person can influence the culture in negative ways.