Building Your First Team in Energy & Industrial Tech

A practical guide for early-stage energy & climate founders making their first 5–10 hires

Jan 21, 2026

by Yin Lu (Partner) and Lauren Miller (Head of Talent), MCJ

Our portfolio founders are solving some of the toughest industrial and energy challenges—rewiring generation and storage, driving efficiency in heavy industry, and building infrastructure for climate volatility. Once capitalized, their biggest priority is assembling teams that can move fast, adapt, and execute through uncertainty. Early-stage climate & energy founders often face limited runway, capital-intensive roadmaps, evolving regulations, and legacy customers. The first hires must thrive in ambiguity, span functions, and either bring sector depth or ramp quickly.

After more than 1,000 introductions and over 100 hires into the MCJ portfolio, we’re sharing talent trends we’ve seen, the hiring patterns that show up most consistently among repeat founders, and some principles founders should consider as they embark on hiring their early teams.

(1) Talent Market Shifts

People with experience in heavy industrial and regulated industries are in high demand across functions. Most new companies we see are building software and hardware in power generation and storage, grid strengthening, industrial materials, fuels, and chemicals. Hiring has gravitated toward individuals who can navigate regulation-heavy environments and long sales cycles. Founders are looking for talent that can inform regulation-aligned product roadmaps, de-risk technical and financial execution, and build credibility with C&I customers.

At the mid-level—beyond ML engineers—the most in-demand profiles are process engineers and program managers with experience across at least one of three sectors: manufacturing (e.g., Tesla, GE, Apple), utilities (e.g., PG&E, NextEra, Duke Energy), and/or oil and gas (e.g., Chevron, Shell, Oxy). These operators are valued for their ability to design and deploy industrial systems at speed and scale, while adapting to AI-driven efficiency gains layered onto physical infrastructure.

On org structure, instead of hiring a recruiter as their first HR role, more founders are opting for a generalist Head of People who can own recruiting alongside HR fundamentals. This gives early teams flexibility and reduces handoffs at a stage where priorities shift quickly and headcount decisions are tightly coupled to runway.

(2) Patterns in How Repeat-Founders Hire

The most experienced founders recognize that leverage drives progress. Multi-time founders actively recruit a trusted right-hand early on, often in the form of a Chief of Staff, to offset founder blind spots and increase execution velocity. These roles skew toward operators with strong program management and cross-functional fluency; common backgrounds include policy, venture, or consulting, paired with prior operating experience in heavy industries. In practice, Chiefs of Staff become the connective tissue between technical teams, external stakeholders, and long-horizon execution.

Don’t rush into hiring commercial folks. Repeat founders consistently run the sales process themselves and fight the urge to “press the easy button” to hire an industry vet. This steep learning curve enables them to internalize how customers—especially in established and traditional industries—actually buy: where deals stall, who the real decision-makers are, and which constraints are structural versus negotiable. The gained clarity directly informs what “good” looks like in a first Head of Sales or CRO and avoids mis-hires driven by resume prestige vs. fit with the product DNA and nuanced sales motion.

Early hiring decisions should be evaluated through one lens: does this person reduce execution risk across technology, product, regulation, and/or customers within the next 6–9 months? The strongest hires have operated inside complexity before and can translate between software, hardware, policy, and real-world deployment. Founders who prioritize this judgment early avoid blown timelines, preserve runway, and reduce downstream rework in markets with steep learning curves.

(3) Best Practices for Founders around Early Hiring

Hiring is one of the few levers early-stage founders fully control once capital is raised. Across the most successful teams, a few repeatable practices show up again and again:

Breadth Breeds Serendipity

One of the biggest misconceptions in recruiting is that precision beats breadth. In practice, breadth creates optionality. Founders should treat recruiting as an ongoing pipeline rather than a role-by-role process. Optimize for consistently meeting high-quality people instead of waiting for perfectly defined openings. Early-stage priorities often shift faster than job descriptions, and over-indexing on exact role fit can cause you to miss candidates who would materially raise the bar.

Make time to meet strong operators (people who have a high say/do ratio) across functions and seniority levels, even when you’re not actively hiring. Keep lightweight notes and maintain warm follow-ups (leverage your ATS of choice or simply leverage a tool like Tasklet to remind you to follow up). Many of the most effective early hires are people founders met months earlier, before a clear role existed, who became obvious adds once timing aligned.

Just last year, we heard the following sentiment from at least 5 founders: “We didn’t have a role, then we met X and made one.” This mindset is a feature, not a bug!

Content Reach as a Talent Discovery Engine

Rather than chasing the same highly sought-after candidates, founders who invest early in sharing how they think about their problem space tend to attract more aligned talent over time.

We’ve seen people engage with the MCJ newsletter or podcast because they found a founder-written piece interesting, then later connect with portfolio companies, host events, or become early hires.

Creating a mechanism to share your perspective becomes a dual-use lever when it educates your market and surfaces talent you’d never find through outbound sourcing alone. Start writing or speaking early—well before you’re hiring—about the real challenges you’re tackling. Focus on where mission-driven operators already gather and engage authentically. By the time you need someone, you’ll often have warm relationships to draw from. Justin Lopas, COO of Base Power, does this particularly well.

AI Helps—But Human Intuition Matters More

AI tools promise efficiency in recruiting, but they’re not yet a substitute for founder judgment. The strongest hiring signals still come from referrals, warm outreach, and context-rich conversations within dense networks.

Founders should use AI to expand discovery—tools like Harmonic or Happenstance can very effectively help surface patterns and profiles—but not to outsource decision-making. Technology provides reach; relationships provide precision.

At MCJ, our talent approach reflects these principles. We connect people around real shared interests, stay close to founders as hiring needs evolve, and measure quality through feedback on both sides. If you’re navigating early hiring in complex industries, pressure-test your approach after every hire. Ask whether execution got meaningfully easier within 90 days. If it didn’t, recalibrate quickly and adjust how you hire next.

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