I would take more of a micro-view of it. Which is: Okay, how many great product pickers do you have, people who can actually conceptualize new products? And then how many great architects do you have, who can actually build it? Sometimes, by the way, those are the same person. Sometimes it’s a solo act. And sometimes that’s the founder.

On the sourcing side, one big obstacle is that people’s networks are really homogenous, especially along racial and ethnic lines and along educational-background lines. Our networks are filled with mostly people who are similar to us, and when you’re at a fairly early stage you rely heavily on your networks to build your company. Companies that

Most of these companies are examples where both power and equity splits between founders were unequal. In general, equal power sharing yields worse outcomes than having a dominant cofounder (or at least one who emerges as dominant once a company starts working). Founding a company is hard, and having a cofounder helps balance the work and stress of

There’s a lot of research that shows that when people question whether they belong, their work performance suffers, their engagement goes down, they’re more likely to leave—all of these bad things happen. What companies typically do is build a culture that works well for the dominant group, but doesn’t work well for people that may not be like the

I’m a big self-awareness advocate, and I would say there are two things you’ve really got to spend a good amount of time on as a founder or CEO and a leadership team. The first one is, what are things that only the founder/CEO can do and which are existential to the company? What must they spend time on? One of those is often recruiting additional

Product, design, and engineering may have the perception of overlapping roles. In reality, each function has highly distinct responsibilities. Design: Design the optimal visual and user experience for the product. Engineering: Build the product. Suggest how the technical road map can drive product and vice versa. Product: Set the product vision and

Many companies make the mistake of spending months building a pipeline for recruiting the very best people, but then spend little time actually onboarding them to make sure they are successful.

Similarly, many founders & early employees spend as much as 30–50% of their time early on (e.g., when scaling from 3 to 15 people) on recruiting. There is no easy fix around it. You need to just grind through large numbers of people (via networking, LinkedIn, friends, etc.) to find the handful of people to join your team.

A common trigger of founder burnout is finding yourself working on things that you hate. Some product-centric founders end up having to spend endless hours on managing people, sitting in meetings discussing sales compensation plans, sales pipelines, marketing plans, HR issues, and other items that bore them to tears. Mark Zuckerberg famously