You don't have a talent problem

It's a context problem, and only leadership can fix it.

One slow team might be a people issue. Two slow teams, a process one. When the whole org feels slow, that’s a context problem.

At the start, every founder can hold the whole company in their head. Everyone knows everyone by name, half the team has “founding” in their title, alignment is just geography. Every decision routes through one or two people who know literally everything, so nothing gets stuck.

Then, if it’s working, everything breaks. New hires start outnumbering the old ones. The hiring bar goes up — higher-caliber people (at least on paper) come inbound, drawn in more by the funding announcement than the mission. The instinct is to keep hiring up, more senior, better resumes.

Which is directionally correct. But decision-making can’t scale through the founder or the founding team alone.

So progress slows with more people and founders get frustrated. They feel the decreased output alongside the increased burn. They start talking about culture, performance management, values — the language of morale.

But the answer is simpler (but more heretical): the solution became the problem. Founders don’t have enough context to make every call anymore, and neither do their senior leaders.

Product-market fit is proof the idea works. It’s not proof the org can carry it.

So yes, hire smart. Then find ways to build the connective tissue that lets the people you already have decide things. That means documented hiring scorecards so the founder doesn’t have to interview everyone for culture fit, (async) meetings for visibility into other teams’ goals, and some level of middle management.

A small tax to pay for these (expensive) A players to do their best work.

Hi! I'm Monica, a former venture investor turned operator. Currently advising, investing, and writing On Paper about what building companies looks like from both sides of the table.