"Only hire when you feel you’re completely desperate for the role". Maybe for a tiny, extremely lean startup. But for anyone else if you wait until you are desperate you will end up hiring the first person that you think might do the job. That doesn't sound like the right way to go to me. But maybe "desperate" is relative.
Although I'm not a founder, the rule I espoused in the early days (<20 people) was to not hire for a role unless 50% of a person's time was collectively being spent on that role across the company. This was a great way to be disciplined in determining what was actually a bottleneck for our growth.
