Startup Leadership Speaker

An early-stage company has no process to fall back on. The leader is the process, and every decision about who to hire and how fast to move gets made in public, under time pressure, on incomplete information. This talk is about the small number of those decisions that compound.

What the talk covers

Hiring comes first, and the returns show up in the hard quarters rather than the easy ones. A+ people do not merely execute better. They hold a company together when the plan stops working, which is the moment an adequate team starts negotiating its own exit. That is the first of the lessons in what leading a startup through 2020 taught me.

Underneath it sits a harder discipline. You do not solve the problems; you build a team that does.

A founder who keeps solving them personally has capped the company at their own throughput without ever noticing it happen, and the symptoms rarely point at the cause: good people drifting out one at a time, every real decision queueing behind a single calendar, a competent team that has learned to wait until it is told. The story a company tells about itself runs into the same trap from the other direction, because a founder who owns the story alone is the only one who can tell it. It recruits, it sells, and it holds people steady through a quarter that goes badly, but only when it is one story rather than a different one for recruits, customers, and the board.

Velocity belongs in the same conversation. Move faster than your market and you burn runway proving something nobody is ready to buy; move slower and someone who shipped earlier takes the position. Is your pace a decision, or just your temperament?

Strategy sits under all of it, and founders skip it routinely on the grounds that they are moving fast. Strategy is getting desirable ends with available means makes the case that the two never were in conflict: strategy tells you which experiments are worth running, and agility without it is motion. The personal version of the same problem is a to-do list growing faster than it shrinks, which is why finding the one milestone that matters turns out to be about building an environment that makes you work on it rather than about summoning more discipline. Founders reach for discipline first and it is almost always the wrong lever.

Who it is for, and what the room leaves with

First-time founders and early-stage CEOs, the operators around them who inherit these decisions, and the investors and boards judging whether a team can carry the next stage. They leave able to tell which of their current problems are people problems, which are strategy problems, and which are pace problems. The three get confused constantly and they have completely different fixes. Other talks are listed on the speaking page.