There’s a moment every fast-growing startup hits. You’ve got 20, 30, maybe 40 people. You’re hiring fast. The product is shipping. Investors are happy.
And then someone’s laptop dies the morning of a board meeting, a new hire shows up on their first day with no access to anything, or, worst case, you get a phishing email that half the company clicks on.
And everyone looks around and asks the same question: wait, who handles IT here?
The Honest Answer (That Nobody Wants to Give)
At most startups, the honest answer is: whoever gets stuck with it.
Sometimes it’s the ops manager who “seems tech-savvy.” Sometimes it’s an engineer who didn’t say no fast enough in a meeting. Sometimes it’s the CEO who set up everyone’s Google accounts back in the four-person days and never officially handed that off to anyone.
This is not a criticism. It’s the predictable result of building a company fast. When you’re pre-Series A, you figure it out. But at some point, usually somewhere between 15 and 50 employees, figuring it out stops working.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Your onboarding is broken. New hires wait three days for laptop access. IT setup is a Google Doc that someone wrote in 2022 and nobody’s updated since. The engineer who set up your Okta instance is now the CTO and doesn’t have time to provision user accounts.
Your offboarding is a liability. When someone leaves, there’s no clean process to revoke access, recover the device, or confirm that company data is actually gone. You assume it’s handled. It probably isn’t.
Security is held together with duct tape. You’ve got Google Workspace, Notion, Slack, GitHub, Figma, a password manager that three people actually use, and nobody has a clear picture of who has access to what. Your enterprise clients are starting to ask about SOC 2. You don’t love what the answer would be right now.
One person is quietly miserable. Somewhere in your org, there is a person who is handling IT tickets, resetting passwords, shipping laptops, and troubleshooting Wi-Fi, and that is not what they were hired to do. They are burning out. They are thinking about quitting.
Why “We’ll Hire an IT Person” Doesn’t Solve It
The instinct is to hire. Put up a job req, find an IT coordinator, problem solved.
But here’s the math: a competent IT hire in NYC runs in fully-loaded salary. For that, you get one person who gets sick, goes on vacation, has a learning curve, and can only be in one place at a time. You’re also now responsible for managing, retaining, and upskilling someone in a role most startup leaders don’t have a background in.
And that one person still can’t do everything. Complex security issues, compliance preparation, device management, and identity infrastructure. These require specialized expertise that a single generalist IT hire typically doesn’t have.
You’re not solving the problem. You’re just owning more of it.
