The hidden belief that kills great startups

Founders, check yourselves for misanthropy

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One of the most widely repeated prescriptions for building a great company is “start with great people.”

A players hire A players, and B players higher C players, Steve Jobs famously observed (and many have echoed since); so fill your team with A players or face a “Bozo explosion.”

And yet: perhaps the single most common failure mode I observe in my most ambitious founder clients is that they are working with a team of largely B and C players.

Why the low bar?

You might think that founders who struggle to find and recruit great people lack the professional network, the charisma and social skills, or perhaps the self-confidence needed to convince exceptional people to join them. And indeed, those are some of the explanations I often get from the founders themselves. But I have found none of these factors to be either necessary or sufficient for explaining why some founders manage to surround themselves with excellent people and others do not.

The one common deno…