We’ve seen startups stall not because they couldn’t find great people, but because setting up legal entities and managing international payroll ate months of runway.
You find the right engineer in Buenos Aires. They’re ready to start. Then you realize: Do we set up an entity in Argentina? What about labor laws? How do we handle payments in pesos? Suddenly, a hire that should take two weeks stretches into two months — or gets scrapped entirely.
This friction doesn’t just slow growth. It narrows your talent pool to wherever your entity already exists.
The Real Cost of Entity Setup
Setting up a legal entity in a new market means lawyers, accountants, compliance research, and local HR expertise. For a scaling startup, that’s a multi-month distraction from building product and serving customers.
Even after setup, you’re managing payroll systems, tax filings, and labor regulations across multiple jurisdictions. Each new market adds operational weight.
The alternative — restricting hiring to one or two countries — limits access to talent and forces compromises on timezone alignment and skill availability.
We needed a different model.
What Actually Matters When Hiring Globally
Through building distributed teams, we learned what drives success:
Timezone overlap — Not perfect alignment, but enough shared hours for real-time collaboration. A team split between San Francisco and Singapore struggles. San Francisco and Montevideo works.
Speed to hire — In competitive talent markets, a two-week advantage in onboarding beats a slightly lower salary every time.
Flexible operations — Startups pivot. Payroll systems and reporting need to adapt without requiring process overhauls.
Compliance without friction — Labor laws matter, but founders shouldn’t become part-time HR lawyers to stay compliant.
The solution isn’t managing entities yourself. It’s working with infrastructure that handles the complexity so you can focus on hiring and building.
How We Approached It
We built a platform designed around what startups actually need:
Strategic Location Focus
Not every market offers the same value. We prioritized regions with strong talent pools and natural timezone alignment — places like Argentina and Uruguay for US-based teams, or Poland for European operations.
This isn’t about cost alone. It’s about finding markets where you can build high-performing teams without sacrificing collaboration.
Automation Where It Counts
Manual processes in onboarding, invoicing, and payroll create bottlenecks. We automated workflows so a new hire can go from offer acceptance to first paycheck in 2–5 business days across most markets.
Late payroll cut-offs mean fewer last-minute adjustments. Flexible payment methods let you pay in the currency that makes sense without conversion headaches.
Customizable Reporting
Every startup tracks differently. We built reporting that adapts to how you work — whether that’s by department, cost center, or project — and integrates with existing accounting and HR systems.
No forced workflows. The platform fits your process, not the other way around.
On-Demand Support
Global hiring means questions across timezones. Support needs to be available when and where you need it, not confined to business hours in one location.
We made sure help is accessible across channels and timezones — because a payroll issue at 10 PM in San Francisco might be noon somewhere else.
What This Unlocks
With the infrastructure in place, hiring becomes a tactical decision, not a strategic distraction.
You can test new markets without committing to full entity setup. You can hire the best person for the role, regardless of location. You can scale your team without scaling your operational overhead.
Most importantly: you spend time building your product and serving customers, not navigating compliance paperwork.
The Tradeoff
There’s always a tradeoff. Using an Employer of Record (EOR) means you don’t own the full employment relationship directly. For some companies — probably a very few — that matters.
But for most startups, the tradeoff is worth it. Speed, flexibility, and reduced operational burden outweigh direct employment control, especially in early growth stages.
What We Learned
Building distributed teams taught us that infrastructure should be invisible. The best systems let you hire fast, stay compliant, and keep operations lean without thinking about them.
Global talent isn’t a luxury anymore — it’s table stakes. The companies that win are the ones that remove friction from hiring, not the ones with the deepest legal teams.
If you’re scaling and spending more time on entity setup than on hiring great people, you’re optimizing the wrong thing.
The takeaway: Global hiring doesn’t have to be a months-long project. The right infrastructure lets you move fast, stay compliant, and focus on what matters — building a great team and a great product.
Teros is your founding engineering team for early-stage startups. With over a decade of experience partnering with Bay Area companies, we specialize in building high-performing teams across software development, machine learning, cloud-native solutions, and infrastructure.
We've helped startups scale from pre-seed to post-Series A, providing the technical expertise and talent you need to succeed. Whether you need full-stack development, DevOps automation, cloud solutions, or team augmentation, we're here to help you build something great.
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