Chapter 33. How to Make Your Company Half as Effective
When Charles, Brian, and I cofounded Ontela, we were all sick of big companies. There were a lot of things we wanted to do differently, but one of the main ones was to build a company that wasnât a faceless bureaucracy. (In hindsight: good goal.)
A company where everyone was impactful. (Absolutely!)
A company where nobody felt disempowered. (Everyone should be empowered to do their job, for sure!)
A company where everyone was a part of the decision-making process. (Wait... should everyone be a part of every decision-making process?)
A company where nobody was left out! (Now something has gone dreadfully awry.)
We made one of the classic startup blunders. We confused individual empowerment, which we all wanted, with its precise inverse: decision by committee.
It started out great: I (the CEO) went over the database schema with Charles (the CTO). Brian (the VP of Business Development) reviewed his pitch decks with Charles and me, who had lots of feedback. Charles and Brian would suggest dozens of changes to my fundraising pitch, most of them quite helpful. We were a well-functioning team.
Except that we werenât getting work done very fast. We were putting in long hours, but it always seemed like there was more activity than there was progress. We didnât realize it at the time, but we had run afoul of one of the most important rules of startup productivity: if two people work on a task, it takes at least twice as long
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