Second question first, early employees are from anywhere, just make sure they are hungry to ship. You want devs able to self-organize and self-manage amid ambiguity and pivots, and filled with an urgency to get working software in the hands of users to get feedback to iterate, and you want sales/product able to listen and drive focus on product that users believe could be 10x better than however they meet their need today.

Answering your first question, this answer sounds cynical, but this is how the math usually has to work for VC to give outsized returns to pools of investors in VC funds:

You need to have a 20% to 5% chance at 2x - 10x annualized growth generating high cash flow and high margins reinvestable in the business with ability to switch modes and cash out or IPO in 5 years to let investors exit by year 7.

In other words, don't aim for a solid dependable low risk business plan. Aim for a unicorn business plan. To get funding, your business plan should be so compelling that in a funding round of 10 startups, yours is the one delivering returns that make up for the other 9 blowing up, and still giving the investors in the venture fund returns that are a multiple of the stock market.

Remember VC have customers too, their investors. Their investors want a basket of startups that handily beat just parking their money in a market-beating ETF of Apple, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Netflix, Alphabet, Microsoft ...

In practical terms, your business plan must convincingly show that the startup can grow exponentially (not just "up and to the right" but a curve) and overcome inherent risks (show you're risk aware, and already planning to beat the risks). Investors are looking for ideas that can stand out in a portfolio where the rare successes can de-risk returns that far outweigh the more common failures, for their portfolio to generate overall profitable returns.

To get funding, position your startup as a standout gem for a portfolio.