Team, Pace, Founder: Three Things I Keep Coming Back To

A few years into building startups, I’ve jotted down scattered notes along the way. Some came from holes I fell into myself, others from watching peers take the long way around. Here’s a rough cleanup of the ones I keep returning to. If any of it helps a fellow founder, that’s enough.

Start with team.

The first hire I’d push on is growth, and the counterintuitive part is that your growth person should have a technical background and have actually run growth before. In the AI era, growth isn’t a pure marketing role anymore. Someone who can’t write code and has never operated a growth loop will struggle to understand how an agent works, how to tune a prompt, or how to wire up a data pipeline, and they’ll struggle to have a real conversation with the engineering team. You think you’re hiring growth. You’re actually hiring a half-engineer who understands product and engineering. The ability to build their own tools matters just as much. I once heard Anthropic’s head of growth mention that Claude’s browser extension was actually built and shipped by their growth team. That kind of ship-a-real-feature capability is precious for a growth team today. The Anthropic case might be a stretch for an early team, but the everyday version is the same: a growth person who sets up their own landing-page A/B tests, scrapes competitor data for monitoring, runs their own SEO tools, and wires up simple automations through APIs, without waiting in the engineering queue every time. If your growth team is still negotiating features with engineering and filing for dev resources just to build growth tools, it’s worth asking whether the profile was off from the start.

Next, find your engineering lead before you build the team, not after. Good engineering leads are genuinely hard to find, so a lot of teams do it backwards, hiring whoever’s available to fill seats and figuring they’ll slot a leader in later. Looking back, the engineering friction that approach accumulates usually costs more than the time you’d have spent waiting. Once a team’s early development processes and technical norms drift in the wrong direction, fixing them later takes far longer. You think you saved three months and you end up spending six on cleanup. So if you can, it’s worth waiting. And while you build, give your engineering lead real authority and respect their own preferences on who to hire. Startups have more than enough uncertainty already. The engineering team should at least be internally coherent and at peace with itself.

One observation that’s hit me harder over the years: algorithm ability and engineering management are two different things. A senior algorithm lead from a big company who ran a team of dozens does not necessarily run a ten-person engineering team well. The algorithm world, especially the research-leaning side, rewards individual brilliance and a lot of solo work. Engineering is the opposite. Its core skill is tight collaboration, and a team that pulls together beats a handful of strong individuals each running their own way. The underlying logic of the two organizations is just different. I’ve seen more than once a startup where the co-founder is an algorithm person running the tech team, and the product can’t launch for months, then ships full of production issues, with engineers grinding past midnight. It’s not that algorithm people aren’t capable. Engineering management is simply its own skill, and candidates strong at both are rare. When you hire, look at the two dimensions separately, and don’t assume a high big-company title means someone can lead anything. In most cases I wouldn’t put an algorithm lead in charge of the whole engineering team.

Then there’s pace.

Set your expectations for the post-launch reaction to “quiet,” in advance. First-time founders love to imagine the script where everything closes in three months, the launch goes viral, and revenue pours in. That story is rare. Most projects are pretty quiet after launch, and the high-concurrency scaling, the flood of support tickets, the emergency hiring you rehearsed for probably won’t happen. If they do, great. If they don’t, no need to panic. Best to align the team on this before launch, because if the market shrugs on day one, a team will quietly equate “didn’t go viral” with “failed,” and morale falls off a cliff.

And don’t keep the string pulled taut every day. There’s an old line: the first drumbeat rouses courage, the second drains it, the third exhausts it. If every launch is run on a “this is about to explode” footing, then every time the market stays calm the team’s spirit drops fast, bodies wear down, and after a few rounds of that, people drift away. Declaring “if not now, when” the moment you incorporate and pushing everyone into nine-to-nine, seven days a week looks like drive in the short term. Long term it’s spending down the team’s morale, and once it’s spent it doesn’t come back.

Instead, concentrate your force at the decisive moment. Work like a lion. A lion doesn’t chase all day. It conserves energy, keeps its own read on the prey, and when the moment comes it pounces fast. Good opportunities keep appearing in the AI era, so a founder needs their own judgment about the industry and a sustainable everyday pace that leaves the team room to breathe, so that when a real opportunity arrives the whole team can spring on it in top form. In practice that means easing off a little after each big launch, letting everyone look at the data and feedback before the next move, rather than running people like machines from one thing straight into the next. By the time you actually need everyone to go all out, they may have nothing left.

Finally, the founder.

Focus on your strengths, delegate your weaknesses. Trying to hold everything is one of the easiest traps early on. It doesn’t just exhaust you and scatter your attention. The bigger cost is that it drives people away. In a company where the founder decides everything, even great people can’t grow. And what founders cling to most isn’t the big stuff. It’s the small things that feel like “only I can call this”: a pricing tweak, the wording of an offer, a line of website copy, a key email to a customer. There’s almost always someone on the team better suited to handle these, and the truly irreplaceable decisions are few. When a teammate makes a small mistake, the learning cost was going to be paid anyway, and over the long run that account comes out ahead.

People over things, especially early. During fundraising it’s a plus for a founder to look well-rounded and able to carry the ceiling. But if after the raise you’re still stuck in “the company’s ceiling in every dimension is me,” you’ve locked the company’s upside. A lot of the ideas that successful startups eventually break out on weren’t what the founder pitched at the first raise. They bubbled up from the right person inside the team, bottom-up, during the work. Finding the right people, attracting them, working well with all kinds of people, and building a culture that good people want to join, those are the parts of a founder’s job that actually matter.

And are you driven by wanting to win, or by fear of losing. This one isn’t just about evaluating a founder. It matters to anyone choosing which startup to join. In most companies’ early stage a lot gets papered over, but somewhere around a few million in ARR a founder’s true scope starts to show. Some founders, having reached a million in ARR, stop daring to take risks on new directions and sit on a small gold mine. Others keep a burn-the-boats mindset and would rather not do it at all than do it small. Neither is absolutely right or wrong. Risk and reward scale together. But from the perspective of an employee joining a startup, people are betting on the company’s ceiling. If it folds, your options are just worthless paper. If it wins, your upside is tied to the company’s value. So when you choose where to join, the ceiling is a crucial coordinate.

Look back at all three and team, pace, and founder sound independent, but dig down and they’re the same thing: how honest the founder is with themselves, with the team, and with the stage they’re actually in. Direction can change, the business model can change, but once these go misaligned it’s very hard to make it back with more effort. That’s probably why two teams from the same starting line can be so far apart two or three years on. These are all questions I’ve circled back to many times. Not every line is right. If you see it differently, or any of it resonates, I’d genuinely love to talk.