somehow live on. Look for deliverables that take too long for their complexity level, especially if their quality is also disappointing. If you tolerate the leaders and teammates who create drag, you’ll soon see your A players walk out the door to escape your culture of mediocrity and dysfunction.

This is what team drag looks like at your startup: misaligned decisions, miscommunication, wasted work, unnecessary rework, and the need to fill gaps left by departing key players. These will all drain your precious time, money, and energy. Every team has limited energy, and you can either waste it on drag or use it to build the startup. If you tak

If you’re already spinning your wheels wondering whether you need to retrofit your team to a new model, the study offers a word of caution. The study found that shifting models midstream was very damaging, often leading to an exodus of disgruntled employees, which badly hurt financial results. This conclusion should convince leaders that they reall

How does the choice of organizational model affect the trajectory of a startup? You’ll begin to see here how the people decisions you make in the early stages of your startup will matter in the long game.

Long game founders like Larry Page and Liran Belenzon are exceptions. Many founders have told us things like, “I manage products, not people,” or “Team culture is a luxury that can wait.” If you’re still inclined to believe statements like that, consider the conclusion of one of the most seminal studies ever done on tech startups: your early decisi

Asked why most tech founders don’t focus on people issues, given the clear payoff, he replied, “People think that investing in your people requires hard work and only has a long-term return. They are wrong on both counts. Sure, it’s work, but it isn’t a lot of work. And the benefit is felt immediately. Potential employees decide to join or not join

was an imprecise game of prediction. Most of the time, you’re relying on the weak signals of a résumé, several interviews, and maybe a written technical test or a business plan presentation. BenchSci’s employee churn was significantly lower than the tech industry average (25 percent voluntary churn in North America in 2021). Yet they saw many more

Liran deals with hard science, but he also understands the importance of getting the culture right. As an engineering manager at BenchSci told us, “Your title and your role aren’t limitations on the amount of influence you can have in shaping the various tracks of development in the company.” The culture BenchSci has built is the antithesis of the

Larry, whom we consider one of the most brilliant organizational strategists of our time, liked to tell the story of his grandfather, a Detroit factory worker. This man died a little bit each day on the assembly line, suffering from a lack of autonomy, with no freedom to use his creativity to make things better, and from a need to cater constantly