Stop planning your entire life at twenty

A striking number of the people we interview could not have described their current job at twenty-two, because it did not exist, or because they had not met the person who would offer it.

What the numbers actually say

Every founder we speak to describes the same wall at roughly the same point: the business works, the team is small, and the next hire is the one nobody can afford to get wrong. What changes is how they talk about it afterwards.

Some treat it as a hiring problem and solve it with a better job post. The ones who get past it tend to describe it differently — as a question about what the business is for, answered by who they bring in.

The first ten people decide what the next hundred believe is normal.

Where it goes wrong

The failure is rarely dramatic. It is a good person hired into a role nobody had defined, reporting to a founder who had not yet decided what they wanted to stop doing themselves.

1. The role is written after the person is chosen.
2. Nobody owns the outcome, so everybody advises on it.
3. Six months later the founder is still in the detail.

What to take from it

None of this is unique to Nepal, but the market here makes it sharper: the pool is smaller, reputations travel faster, and a bad first year is visible to everyone who might have joined next.