What Founders and Investors Get Wrong Building Startup Teams
Inside the a16z Speedrun Startup Culture Brunch
During Tech Week 2025, I attended the a16z Speedrun Startup Culture Brunch, a private discussion at Andreessen Horowitz’s San Francisco office for about a hundred early-stage investors and angels. Rather than valuations or AI trends, the event focused on a topic far harder to quantify: how startups build and sustain culture. Moderated by Tom Hammer, Head of People at a16z Speedrun, the conversation featured Warren Shaeffer, Partner at Pear VC and 3x former founder, and Gagan Biyani, CEO at Maven and Co-Founder of Udemy. What followed wasn’t the typical “culture is important” talk. Instead, they dug into what most founders and investors get wrong about building early teams, dissecting some of the less obvious mistakes and what actually distinguishes the teams that make it.
What Founders Get Wrong
1. Hiring Quickly on Background Instead of Substance
Founders move fast… sometimes too fast. When the pressure builds to fill a seat, pedigree often becomes a shortcut. Big logos feel safe and imply competence, but the best founders know that “experience” isn’t the same as execution.
As Gagan put it, “At a micro level, you have to forget speed and focus on the risk of hiring the wrong person.” In early-stage teams, the cost of a mis-hire compounds quickly. Before hastily extending an offer based on resume, founders should slow down long enough to ask: What did this person actually build? What decisions did they own? What broke under their watch, and what did they do about it?
Speed still matters, but “hire slow, fire fast” is less about pace and more about precision.
2. Spending Too Much Time Coaching
Many early-stage founders equate being a good leader with being a good mentor. This intuition is well intentioned, but when the goal is to build a category-defining business, there often isn’t enough time. Especially before product-market fit, a founder needs to fully concentrate on making strategic decisions that keep the company on course.
As the panel put it, “The CEO’s job in the early days is to find talent, not cultivate it.” Management at this stage is about providing direction, not development, to protect focus. Great founders design systems that attract and empower self-driven operators, freeing up their own bandwidth to make higher-leverage decisions.
3. Mistaking Aggression for Toxicity
Aggression in the workplace sounds unhealthy on the surface, but the panel made a compelling case for its nuance.
“Don’t calm people down if they’re pissed for a good reason. Figure out what’s underneath that frustration and go after it.” Mission-driven intensity, when paired with ethics, is a feature, not a flaw. Enduring founders learn how to harness that energy and direct it toward problems that matter.
What Investors Get Wrong
1. Playing Parent to Founders
It’s tempting for investors to step in as pseudo-managers when portfolio company dynamics get messy, but that instinct usually backfires. No one knows the inner workings of startups better than their founders.
The best investors know their lane: to reflect, not to rescue. As Warren put it, their job is to “hold up a mirror,” reminding founders why they backed them in the first place, not to hand out parenting advice on hiring or firing, especially if they haven’t been operators themselves.
2. Investing in Management Experience Over Sense of Urgency
Investors love pattern recognition, and founders with strong track records naturally inspire confidence. But that same predisposition can lead to overvaluing “experienced managers,” assuming prior leadership success will automatically translate to early-stage velocity.
Management ability matters, but it’s not the differentiator many investors believe it to be. At the earliest stages, you don’t need a polished executive; you need someone obsessed, decisive, and self-aware. Management can be taught while hunger and conviction can’t.
3. Believing Management Training Solves Culture
Many first-time founders aren’t great managers and that’s completely fine. When team dynamics start to fray, however, investors sometimes prescribe leadership courses or executive coaches as a cure-all. Yet as the panel pointed out, “there is no management training that really works” because everything is context-dependent and there’s no off-the-shelf solution to building culture.
Most early-stage dysfunction stems from a lack of self-awareness, not from missing frameworks. Investors can step in when leadership teams go off the rails, but prompting reflection early almost always leads to better outcomes.
Truths from the Room:
By the end of the brunch, the conversation shifted from mistakes to the lessons that stood out.
1. Great Founders Aren’t Always Nice, But They Are Kind
As Warren noted, there’s a difference between nice and being kind.
Nice = short-term pleasant; conflict-avoidant
Kind = long-term considerate; even if short-term unpleasant
The most effective managers get comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. When something feels off, they call it out quickly. They understand that it’s more helpful to be kind than nice because clarity, even when painful, is what actually helps people and teams improve.
2. When Hiring, Red Flags Are Standard. Green Flags Are Personal.
Short tenures, weak references, vague contributions… there’s a well-worn list of warning signs to avoid when evaluating candidates. But there’s no universal heuristic for identifying the perfect hire.
As Gagan shared, the best early hires are chosen through self-awareness rather than consensus checklists. Founders should understand what styles they work best with (and which ones they don’t) to build the kind of team that amplifies their strengths and covers their blind spots.
3. Culture Follows Performance
During Q&A, I asked the panel what measures of culture matter most and what founders should do if retention is low. The response was clear: in the earliest stages, performance matters more than culture. Turnover is expected, and culture metrics can only tell you so much. Above all else, the founders’ responsibility is to stay laser-focused on building and scaling the business.
But performance doesn’t replace culture; it creates it. Culture is a byproduct of how a team performs when the stakes are high. Every decision, deadline, and trade-off teaches people what the company actually values.
Final Thoughts
As I walked out of Andreessen Horowitz’s office and along the Embarcadero toward my next meeting in the Ferry Building, I kept coming back to one idea from the brunch: there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for culture, but every startup story begins with the team. The best founders surround themselves with people who push them to see the market, the mission, and themselves more clearly. In a world driven by technology, every startup’s most defining variable is human.