At the beginning of my second venture, I placed most of my attention where many founders do.
Product.
That seemed reasonable enough. How to cut the first version, how to explain it, how to build it, how to make the business model stand up, those all looked like the obvious risks.
Once I had actually lived through it, I realised something less flattering.
Product is hard. Markets are hard. But the thing most capable of distorting a company’s timeline is often people.
And not usually in a dramatic, one-day collapse. More like a leak. At first it only feels slightly inconvenient. Much later you realise the whole structure has been taking damage for some time.
It was not as though I chose people casually
I took the early team search seriously.
I went through a large number of profiles, had conversations with many candidates, and used every channel I could reach at the time: LinkedIn, co-founder matching platforms, founder communities, referrals, whatever looked remotely useful.
I was not naive enough to think enthusiasm alone would be enough. I knew early team mistakes would be expensive.
So my filters were not low.
I looked for people with start-up experience, or at least some kind of self-directed work history. Freelancing mattered to me. So did signs that someone was no longer tightly held inside a big-company structure. And yes, I still looked at CVs, titles and backgrounds. In the early stages I was not immune to the attraction of strong signals, good schools, large firms, senior roles.
What I learnt, painfully, is that those signals can mislead you.
Not because people are necessarily lying, but because being very effective inside an established organisation is not the same thing as being able to create movement without structure, support or protection.
Those are different games.
A lot of people want the rewards of start-up life, not the start-up itself
Some candidates were easy to rule out.
If the first serious question was how much money they would get, I usually knew quickly that we were not looking at the same thing. Not because talking about money is wrong, but because I was not hiring employees in the conventional sense. I was looking for people willing to carry risk, ambiguity and a lot of unglamorous work.
The harder cases were the ones who sounded right.
They could talk about vision. They could talk about commitment. Some even said they were willing to go without salary for a while. But once they were actually inside the work, something else emerged.
The energy became passive. They needed to be managed like employees. Dirty work repelled them. Pressure shrank their judgement. The idea of entrepreneurship remained attractive, but the actual texture of it did not.
I eventually realised that many people are not malicious or incompetent.
They simply want the outcomes associated with start-up life, growth, upside, freedom, a compelling story, without wanting the thing itself.
And early on, the thing itself is usually messy. It is repetitive. It is unrewarded. It is often slightly embarrassing. It contains a great deal of work that no one praises.
If someone has no tolerance for that layer, a convincing founder story does not last very long.
Strong CVs do not automatically translate into zero-to-one ability
That was another expensive lesson.
Some people genuinely have impressive backgrounds. Good schools, large firms, senior titles. At first glance, it is tempting to assume that bringing someone like that into the company will stabilise everything.
Then the real work starts and you discover something less glamorous.
People who have done well in structured environments are often strong at navigating existing systems, leading inside existing teams, making decisions with existing support. Those are real strengths. They just do not automatically convert into zero-to-one effectiveness.
Because at the earliest stage, nothing is waiting for you.
No junior team quietly carrying the operational load. No established process absorbing uncertainty. No one else cleaning up the vague and ugly parts.
You have to do that yourself.
And some people who look extraordinarily strong on paper are simply not built for that environment. Not because they are frauds. Because the environment never required that particular kind of stamina from them.
That changed how I think about hiring in general. Not just for start-ups, but for any role where ownership is supposed to be real rather than ceremonial.
I care more about integrity now, and not in a grand, heroic sense
If you asked me now what matters most in an early co-founder, I would not start with intelligence, speed or credentials.
I would start with integrity.
And not the dramatic, slogan-heavy version. I mean the dull, boring kind.
Are they honest about progress.
Do they admit what they cannot do.
Do they overstate things to customers or investors in order to secure the next opportunity.
When pressure rises, do their standards quietly move.
I worked with people who could speak well, move fast and look exactly like the sort of profile a start-up should want. It took time to realise that our ideas of acceptable behaviour under pressure were fundamentally different.
Can you tell a customer something half-true if it helps.
Can you frame things more generously than reality supports when talking to investors.
Can you make the picture prettier first and deal with the consequences later.
Some people would call that flexibility. I could see where that logic came from. But once that kind of flexibility starts sliding, it quickly enters territory I cannot accept.
A lack of ability slows you down. A mismatch in values bends the whole company.
Those are not the same scale of problem.
One of my clearest mistakes was waiting too long to act
That part is on me.
I saw warning signs earlier than I wanted to admit.
Quality that was not stable. Commitment that sounded stronger than it looked in practice. Very low tolerance for pressure. A tendency to behave like an employee while claiming to want founder-level responsibility.
None of this arrived without signals.
The reason I delayed was simple and expensive. Recruiting again takes time. Recruiting again costs money. Recruiting again means giving up on the hope that the current person might improve.
And every time you restart, you lose more than time. You lose alternative candidates. You lose momentum. You lose a bit of your own trust in the team.
For a while, I was making decisions under the influence of sunk cost.
Not because I did not recognise the friction, but because I did not want to start over.
That is a classic founder mistake.
Choosing the wrong person happens. Letting the wrong person stay because restarting feels worse is usually what becomes truly expensive.
This is not really a story about “bad people”
I try not to tell this part of the story as though I was simply surrounded by hopeless people. That version is too easy, and not very useful.
The more honest version is that people who can genuinely function in very early-stage environments are rare.
That is because early-stage work is not just ordinary capability under greater pressure. It requires a particular combination: tolerance for ambiguity, tolerance for low feedback, willingness to do ugly work, and the ability to create some structure without waiting for someone else to provide it.
Many capable people have never had those qualities tested. That is not a moral failure. It is just a mismatch between environment and person.
Which is why I no longer use titles as my main proxy.
I pay more attention to what someone does when things are vague, when the work is dirty, when the pressure is slightly humiliating, when no one is giving them a neat lane to operate in.
That matters in start-ups. It also matters in larger organisations. The difference between someone who grows responsibility in uncertainty and someone who waits for it to be handed over is very real in product work, hiring and collaboration.
Product is hard, but people decide whether you even get to the next question
I used to think product was the hard part.
Defining the problem, cutting scope, building something real rather than decorative, all of that is difficult. I still believe that.
But in my second venture, what I learnt is that people can distort the timeline more directly than product ever does.
A slow product can be improved. A bad feature cut can be corrected. A broken market assumption can be pivoted.
The wrong people do something else. They turn your forward motion into repair work. They convert shared burden into private burden. They add friction where no friction should exist.
And the worst part is that it rarely explodes all at once.
It seeps in.
At first things merely feel off. Later everything feels slower than it should. Eventually you realise that a large portion of your energy has been spent compensating for problems that should never have been part of the company in the first place.
By the time you fully acknowledge that, you have usually lost quite a lot already.
What I took away is not bitterness, but a stricter standard
If I were choosing co-founders again, I would still care about ability. Of course I would.
But I would change the order.
Integrity first.
Then owner mindset.
Then everything else: communication, credentials, polish, previous company names.
Because I now trust a simple distinction more than I used to.
A lack of ability is often visible early.
A lack of integrity takes longer to surface and costs more once it does.
The next piece moves away from people and into the market itself. Even if the team had been perfect, there was another lesson waiting for me there: a real problem is still not enough to make a market move.