Ignoring people issues in favor of technical, financial, and strategic issues is a fatal trap. Those deceptively minor, hard-to-quantify team challenges will undermine your success if not confronted with resolve.

Everyone has aspirations for a better future, and when placed in a social structure that furthers their goals, most people will consistently make good decisions. Aldi studied how megachurch and cult leaders build loyal followings, then applied what he learned to redirect those strategies toward good (and, we underscore, nonmanipulative) goals. For

Harvard and McKinsey study found that 65 percent of funded startups fail primarily because of people problems.2 In 2020, this study was replicated by researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. They surveyed close to seven hundred venture capital firms across the world and found a similar picture. The top reason for startup f

Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to be standing near a raging bonfire. Fire can be a wild and destructive force. Yet here you and your friends are, basking in the light and heat of a carefully controlled inferno. You can inspect the flame up close without being consumed by it. In this space, everyone’s senses are heightened. The sleepy become

Yet if you look at any company that blows up because of people issues, you can rewind the tape six, twelve, or twenty-four months to where the challenges started. And you’ll see that these were avoidable problems—if only they had been addressed early enough.

Given how both games vie for your time, the single toughest challenge for your startup is how to win the short game without risking the long game.

Let’s return to Alex and Dani, who are actual startup founders we know, with only their names and a few details disguised. We listened to their painful experiences. We took account of the pressures they faced, the personalities at play, and the egos at risk. Unfortunately, their stories echo those of hundreds of other entrepreneurs. Alex and Dani b

short runway to either take off or crash, which contributes greatly to the intense environments we talk about in this book. Despite these unique characteristics, startup teams have much in common with other kinds of teams, from those at corporate giants to those at nonprofit organizations operating on a shoestring budget. Whenever big ambitions and

the people issues that sink even the most promising endeavors.