Asher's Blog

You can have too much great talent.

This may sound inconsistent with my belief that founders should recruit the best people they can find. I strongly support having excellent talent, particularly at the top of the organisation, because outstanding leaders attract other outstanding people. They establish standards, increase the quality of decisions and make the company more credible to employees, customers and investors.

But talent is not valuable merely because it is impressive. It becomes valuable when it is applied to a problem important enough to justify it.

When a startup hires several highly capable people to solve essentially the same problem, excellence can become congestion. Authority overlaps, decisions become political and talented people begin competing for scope because the company has not created sufficiently distinct responsibilities for them.

The problem is not that the people are too good. The problem is that the organisational design is too small or too unclear for the amount of senior talent placed inside it.

Great talent at the top should solve massively different problems.

Talent requires sufficient scope

Exceptional people usually want meaningful responsibility. They want to make decisions, build systems and see a clear relationship between their judgment and the outcome. If several senior people enter a young company without clearly differentiated problems, they will naturally begin touching the same decisions.

One person believes they own product strategy, while another believes commercial insight gives them equal authority over the roadmap. A chief operating officer begins making decisions that overlap with the chief executive’s responsibilities. A strategy leader develops plans that operating leaders do not feel responsible for executing. Meetings become longer because each talented person has a sophisticated perspective and enough status to expect that perspective to shape the answer.

The company may appear stronger because the leadership page contains impressive names, but the organisation experiences confusion about who actually owns the result.

Great talent needs enough scope to matter. The problem should be difficult, consequential and distinct enough that the person can exercise judgment without constantly negotiating territory with another leader.

This is why I advocate for excellent people at the top of the chain, but not a collection of senior people whose mandates sound different only because their titles are different. If two roles cannot be distinguished by the outcomes they own, the company should question whether it needs both.

Strong leaders should attract talent, not duplicate it

One of the best reasons to hire a great leader is that the person can multiply talent beneath them. A strong engineering leader does not merely write good code; they attract good engineers, establish sound architecture and improve the quality of technical judgment throughout the team. A strong commercial leader can recruit salespeople, create a repeatable process and help average performers become better.

This creates leverage. The company does not need to recruit every excellent employee directly through the founder because important leaders become magnets and developers of talent.

However, that leverage disappears when the company hires several expensive leaders without giving any of them the authority to build. Instead of one person creating a coherent function, multiple people attempt to influence a small team. Employees learn to manage competing expectations, and the founder remains the final referee in conflicts that the leadership structure itself created.

The test of a senior hire is therefore not simply whether the person is individually exceptional. The founder should ask what organisation this person will build, what decision quality they will improve and which important problem will become their responsibility.

If the answer is vague, the company may be hiring prestige rather than capacity.

Before product-market fit, the founders are the core talent

Before a startup achieves product-market fit, the founders should be doing much of the critical work. They should be talking to users, shaping the product, learning how customers describe the problem and discovering what people will pay for. This stage contains too much uncertainty to delegate the central search entirely to a large executive team.

The founders are not only managing the process; they are supposed to be learning from it. If they hire senior people too early to perform the difficult work of discovery, they can become separated from the information needed to make the company’s most important decisions.

This is one reason a startup does not need many founders or a large senior team at the beginning. Two committed founders can cover complementary areas and learn quickly. Three founders can also work when roles, authority and contribution are clear. Beyond that, the coordination burden rises, particularly when several people expect equal influence over every major question.

The precise number is less important than the principle: the company should not build a leadership structure larger than the problem it has understood.

Before product-market fit, the primary question is whether anyone wants the product strongly enough for the company to exist. Adding more management does not answer that question. More leaders can create more plans, meetings and analysis while the company remains uncertain about the customer.

The founders should remain close enough to the work to discover the truth themselves.

Product-market fit changes the hiring question

Once product-market fit begins to appear, the company faces a different problem. It is no longer only trying to discover whether the product creates value; it must learn how to deliver, sell and support that value repeatedly.

Demand begins to expose constraints. Engineering may struggle to deliver what customers need. Sales may depend too heavily on the founder. Operations may fail under increased volume. Customer support may become inconsistent. These are clearer problems around which strong talent can be hired.

The founder can then add one or two important leaders according to the bottleneck, rather than hiring a complete executive team because that is what large companies appear to have.

If distribution is the constraint, a strong commercial leader may be the next consequential hire. If reliability is threatening adoption, technical leadership may matter more. If a regulated operation is expanding, the business may need a strong finance, risk or compliance leader before it needs another person with a general strategy title.

Hiring should follow the sequence of important problems.

As the company expands and obtains more capital, additional senior talent may become necessary. But every new leader should correspond to a new level of complexity or a distinct outcome that the existing team can no longer own well.

The company should earn its organisational complexity.

Headcount is one of the fastest ways to consume capital

One of the quickest ways for a startup to finish its money is to hire many people. Salaries are not isolated expenses; each employee also creates costs around tools, benefits, management, coordination and the time required to make the person productive.

Senior talent is particularly expensive, not only because compensation is higher but because senior people often need teams, budgets and decision scope. Hiring one executive can imply several future hires and a new layer of organisational structure.

This can be justified when the leader solves a problem that unlocks significantly more value than the cost. But founders sometimes hire ahead of evidence. Fresh capital enters the account, the company feels temporarily wealthy and the leadership team expands before the business has developed the revenue or operating complexity to support it.

The runway shortens, expectations rise and the company later has to make painful reductions when the anticipated growth does not arrive on schedule.

Capital should allow the business to accelerate what has begun to work, not disguise the absence of clarity by surrounding the founders with more people.

Before hiring, the founder should ask whether the problem requires a full-time employee, a senior leader, a consultant, a partner or a temporary project. Some specialised knowledge can be borrowed until the scale of the work justifies permanent capacity. A company should not turn every need into headcount.

The best team is not the largest collection of talented people the company can afford today. It is the smallest coherent group capable of achieving the next important stage without placing the business at unnecessary financial risk.

Overlapping talent creates political behaviour

When talented people lack distinct problems, they do not become less ambitious. Their ambition searches for territory.

They may begin competing for access to the founder, ownership of visible initiatives or influence over decisions outside their formal responsibilities. Because each person is capable, each can develop a persuasive explanation for why their involvement is necessary. The founder then spends increasing time aligning strong personalities rather than solving customer and business problems.

This is not always caused by poor character. The structure may be encouraging the behaviour. If two people are evaluated against similar outcomes, given comparable authority and expected to collaborate without a clear decision rule, conflict is predictable.

Coherence requires leaders to understand where their responsibility begins, where it ends and how their work depends on others. Their objectives should be different but connected. They should be able to challenge one another without turning every disagreement into a contest for control.

The CEO remains responsible for ensuring that the leadership team moves as one. But the CEO should not create an unnecessarily complicated system and then blame the people inside it for failing to coordinate.

Organisational design should make collaboration easier than rivalry.

Hire for the problem, not the résumé

The temptation to collect impressive people becomes stronger when a startup begins attracting attention. A founder may feel that hiring someone from a famous company will signal maturity to investors and the market.

Experience from a strong organisation can be valuable, but the candidate’s previous environment may have been completely different. A leader accustomed to abundant resources, established processes and a recognised brand may not enjoy building with limited information and a small team. The résumé is impressive, but the operating problem may not fit the person.

The founder should begin with the work. What is the important problem? What must be true twelve or eighteen months after this person joins? What resources will they actually have? Has the candidate created results under comparable conditions, or only participated in a successful system built by others?

The right senior person should increase clarity and reduce the founder’s dependency on personal intervention. If the hire instead creates another layer requiring the founder to translate, arbitrate and approve, the company has added cost without adding sufficient leverage.

Expand talent as distinct problems emerge

There is no virtue in keeping a company artificially small after the opportunity clearly requires expansion. A business with strong product-market fit, growing demand and enough capital should recruit the people required to serve the market well. Refusing to hire can become as dangerous as hiring too quickly.

The discipline lies in matching talent to distinct, consequential problems. As the organisation grows, new problems become large enough to deserve dedicated leaders: international expansion, enterprise distribution, security, treasury, regulatory complexity, manufacturing scale or organisational development.

At that stage, having several exceptional people at the top is not excess. It is necessary capacity, provided that they own different outcomes and understand how those outcomes combine.

The founder should continually review whether the leadership structure reflects the business that exists, the business being built and the capital available to support the transition between them.

Build a coherent team, not a collection of stars

Great talent is powerful, and great talent at the top of an organisation can raise the standard of everyone who follows. But talent should not be recruited as decoration, insurance or proof that the startup has become important.

Before product-market fit, the founders should remain the core talent doing the difficult work of discovery. After product-market fit, the company should hire according to its most important bottlenecks, adding leaders as genuinely different problems become large enough to require them.

Each exceptional person should have room to build, an outcome to own and a reason their particular judgment matters. Their work should complement the other leaders rather than reproduce the same authority under another title.

And throughout that process, the founder must respect capital. People are often the largest and least reversible expense a young company takes on. Hiring too slowly can limit growth, but hiring too many impressive people before the work justifies them can shorten the company’s life.

Do not aim to assemble the greatest number of talented people. Aim to assemble the smallest group of exceptional people solving the largest number of distinct, important problems.

That is how talent becomes leverage rather than overhead.