The first hire
Biconomy hired me as their first business person. I was not hired to write the protocol. I was hired because the protocol needed people using it, and that work had no owner.
The title did not define the job. The needs of the company did. I worked on sales, partnerships, integrations, developer relations, grants, and monetization. Later I hired and managed a business team across these areas.
Each word covered ordinary work. A partnership needed a use case and people on both sides. An integration needed documentation, support, and an answer when it failed. Developer relations needed examples that an outside team could use. Monetization needed a clear account of what the customer was paying for.
The company completed more than two hundred integrations. The teams we worked with included wallets, applications, banks, and large companies. JPMorgan and Mercedes-Benz were among the named clients. That range made the role broad. The product was technical, but the work around it was not one function.
The useful distinction is between being first and being senior. The first business hire often begins without a finished department to join. There may be no handoff between sales, support, and product because there are not yet enough people to make those separate jobs. The role is to do the work, notice its repeated parts, and give those parts owners.
That is what I mean when I say I was the first business hire. It is a description of the work I had to cover, not a claim that I built the company alone.