People — hiring, firing, feedback, conflict, and leading small teams without the HR fluff
The hardest part of building a company isn't the product or the market — it's the people. Most founder mistakes in this area come from avoiding hard conversations or copying practices from big companies that don't apply to a 5-person startup.
Your first hires are not "filling roles." They're choosing who you'll spend the next 5 years with in a high-pressure environment.
Optimize for:
Don't optimize for:
The single hardest thing founders do. Also the thing they wait too long to do, almost every time.
From Kim Scott's Radical Candor: Care personally, challenge directly. Most founders do one or the other. Good feedback does both simultaneously.
The most dangerous conflicts. Most cofounder breakups could've been prevented by having explicit conversations early.
Prevent:
Resolve:
Don't tell people what to do. Tell them what matters and why, and let them figure out the how. This means:
The most important meeting a manager has. Weekly, 30 minutes, never skip.
Questions that surface real problems:
Don't turn 1:1s into status updates. You can get status from Slack.