Uphill Skiers and Downhill Skiers: Who to Hire Before and After a Shift

The Framework

Most hiring advice treats "great people" as one thing. Christian Lund, co-founder of Templafy, splits them into two, using an analogy from skiing.

"You have two types of skiers. On alpine skiing they go downhill, they try to go as fast as possible. Next time they go up they go even faster. Then you have the other type, the ones that go up to find the next path down the mountain."

Downhill skiers optimize a known route. Uphill skiers go looking for a route that doesn't exist yet. Both are excellent. They are not interchangeable, and which one you need depends entirely on where your company is.

The Two Modes

Early stage needs uphill skiers. When the path down the mountain isn't mapped, you need people who go find it. Christian: "when you're early, you really need a lot of uphill skiers, because you don't know where the path will take us." Less process, more machete. His words for that hire: "give me a machete, I'm just gonna pull my way through the jungle."

Mature stage hires downhill skiers. Once the route is proven, you hire people who run it faster and cleaner. "When you're mature, you only hire people that are downhill skiers, because everything is on formula."

A shift throws you back uphill. Then a new technology hits, the mountain changes, and the formula stops working. "All of a sudden you have to go back to uphill skier mode, which is quite difficult when you already built a business that is now so mature that everything is optimized for going downhill."

What It Looked Like at Templafy

Templafy grew into a mature, roughly two-hundred-person company running on formula, staffed for speed downhill. Then AI arrived, and Christian had to put the business through a full reset, rebuilding the technology foundation over about two and a half years.

The hard part wasn't the technology. It was the people. A company optimized for downhill can't just flip a switch to exploration. "That is really difficult for a lot of businesses like us that built a business and now need to rethink what that means in the age of AI." He's now spending real energy every day trying to get people to think like a startup again: "invite people to join on that journey again. But it's not for everyone."

When It Fails

This breaks when you hire for the stage you wish you were at instead of the one you're in. Bring in pure downhill executors during exploration and they'll ask for a spec that doesn't exist. Bring in restless uphill skiers into a stable, formula-driven machine and they'll reinvent things that were working fine.

It also fails if you assume your existing team will switch modes on command. Many can't, and that's not a character flaw. Christian is blunt: it's not for everyone.

Your First Move

Name your current mode this week. Is your core path down the mountain known, or are you still finding it? Then look at your last five hires and ask if they match that mode. If a shift is hitting your market, start deliberately re-hiring for uphill skiers before the formula fully breaks, not after.