Thread by @justinkan

1/ Feel like you aren’t making progress against your startup goal? “Everything takes longer than it should” is a super common sentiment among founders once things have gotten off the ground.

Solutions: focus more, hire different people, or both.

2/ Focus more: startups get bogged down in spreading themselves too thin / taking on too many things. It is tempting to quote The Mythical Man Month and give every engineer a different project.

3/ If you feel like you aren’t making enough headway on your top goal in your company, you might need to focus on that goal and sacrifice the things that are less important.

4/ Hire different people: Often startups initially hire people who index low on execution and low on experience.

Often those are the only people willing to join your startup at first!

5/ After a certain stage, the company’s pool of available talent might be much broader. However, the founders are often unwilling to re-evaluate whether some of the members of the current team are perhaps too low on execution and/or experience for the startup’s current needs.

6/ Having the wrong people can manifest itself in executing slowly against goals. Mistakes get made, wrong paths get taken, and progress can grind to a halt.

7/ Solution: have ongoing, assertive, candid conversations with team members about the needs of the startup and whether they can meet those needs.

8/ You aren’t doing anyone any favors leaving them in a job they aren’t able to do. If you leave them there they will eventually burn out and quit (but probably become very toxic in your organization first).

9/ Debug this and other problems in your startup with this blog I wrote: atrium.co/blog/debugging…