Executive is a very different skillset from individual contributor, and hiring executives too early on in your company's life is a huge mistake. They have nobody to manage; their strength is in coordinating lots of different people, but you can't afford lots of people. And their presence will be demoralizing to the strong individual contributors who you do need to build the product, because somebody who's rolling their hands up and getting dirty with code or sales is understandably resentful of someone placed above them, drawing a fat salary, who does nothing but give orders that are at best tangentially related to the actual problems your startup faces.

(Source: once worked at a startup with a CEO, 3 VPs, a Chief Architect, 5 engineers, and 6 high-school kids. Yeah, they didn't ship.)