Around the same time, Martin, who was based in Google’s Singapore office in 2015, was building out a no-frills leadership workshop based on how Google trains its own leaders, and on state-of-the-art research about startups.

Not every startup falls into the trap of speed. Some of the most enduring ones keep one eye on the long game as they hustle through their daily crises. They make time to find the right people to bring onto the team. They address toxic behavior early and decisively. They create an environment that turns A players into an A team.

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.

You might have noticed that the stories so far are disappointingly lacking in gender and racial diversity. There was indeed a time in technology’s history when leadership roles went mostly to white men, who had disproportionate access to the resources and inner circles needed to succeed as entrepreneurs. The landscape has, thankfully, started to

The Team Drag Checklist: The team reviews the twenty critical sources of misalignment, miscommunication, and conflict that startups commonly encounter. The team votes on three of these “elephants in the room” that seem most worthy of immediate attention. (See chapter 11 for the checklist.)

Startups are unique in that their goals tend to exist outside the realm of possibility. “10x, not 10 percent” and “moonshot thinking” are mantras in this world. Founders are hugely ambitious, aiming to make the impossible happen. But startups are also typically under tight resource constraints, and many shut down when they run out of money.

Organizational psychologists have a term for these types of self-initiated, extraordinary actions: discretionary effort. It’s the difference between what someone has to do as part of their job description and what they want to do.”11 It’s a passion to go the extra mile, and what level of effort someone exerts in situations where the choice is up to

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

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