Good Management is the Startup Superpower No One Talks About

🌶️ Contents Possibly Spicy 🌶️

tl;dr

Key Ideas

• Bad management, not bad ideas, is why startups fail. Poor execution, dysfunction, and mismanagement bury great ideas before they can succeed.
• Domain expertise alone isn’t enough. Early-stage managers must understand management theory and leadership best practices to scale successfully.
• Culture is the foundation of innovation. Startups thrive when managers foster psychological safety, encourage contribution, and build strong teams.
• Execution matters more than ideation. The best ideas are worthless without structured decision-making and effective leadership.
• The best startups are led, not just founded. Lone geniuses may inspire, but well-led teams drive sustainable success.

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There’s a sticky trope in startup land that the best people to hire as early-stage managers are the rogue geniuses—the brilliant minds who disrupt, challenge, and push boundaries. But in my experience, when startups fail it's due to bad management and poor strategic decisions, not a lack of innovative and visionary ideas.

Some of the best ideas never make it to prime time, not because they aren’t good, but because they’re poorly executed, mismanaged, or buried under dysfunction.

To avoid this, startups need to hire executives who are domain experts AND have experience in and direct exposure to management theory and leadership best practices. Domain expertise alone, even at rogue genius levels, is not enough to steer an early-stage company toward sustainable success.

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High-Level: Making the Right Strategic Decisions

Develop Discernment

Executives need to know how to decipher between business strategies and processes that will work in their organization and those that might have built rocket ships elsewhere but aren't suited to the ops at home.

It’s easy to get caught up in the latest trend or adopt a popular framework from an influencer, podcast or book, but context matters. What worked at OpenAI, Stripe, or Airbnb may not translate to your startup’s unique conditions, resources, and constraints.

I'm a believer in the idea that every failure has value—in the ‘let’s try it out and iterate’ approach to building processes. But in early stage, you can’t simply fail fast. There is just too much at stake. You don’t have unlimited resources, time, or goodwill from your investors and employees. Blindly implementing whatever revolutionary idea you read about in a blog post is a dangerous way to run a company.

A good manager has knowledge of management strategies and techniques that have worked in the past for other companies but also understands the specific conditions and structures within those companies that allowed those theories to succeed there. Knowing when to adapt and when to pass on an idea is a critical leadership skill.

Execution Matters

You can have the most innovative idea in the world, but if your team can’t execute it effectively, it’s worthless. A good manager knows how to translate high-level strategy into actionable plans, prioritize initiatives, and ensure alignment across teams. This is what separates the successful startups from the ones that burn through funding, never finding the synergy to soar.

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Day-to-Day: Habits and Processes That Cultivate and Surface the Best Ideas

Executives need to understand how to do high level abstract things like build a culture that attracts and retains top talent and they need to know how to do day to day routine things like run a meeting that is productive and offers real value to participants. In my experience, true sustainable innovation innovation springs from the synergy of well led teams.

A lot of rogue geniuses have no idea how to do either of these things and frankly they screw up startups. A charismatic rogue genius manager often doesn't know how to bring out the best work or most innovative idea from others at all. Their leadership style tends to be chaotic, their decision-making is often ego-driven, and their meetings become performative rather than functional.

Founders should look to hire executives that demonstrate mastery over soft skills like encouraging universal contribution and humble inquiry. The kind of management and leadership skills that allow people to feel safe expressing themselves authentically allow more creative ideas to surface.

In early stage, many make the mistake of thinking good management practices and leadership come second to innovative ideas, but that is simply not true.

Managers that Build Culture Rule!

The assumption is that if you just hire the best and brightest, great things will happen. But talent alone isn’t enough. A great startup culture isn’t about ping-pong tables or kombucha on tap—it’s about creating an environment where people feel valued, challenged, and psychologically safe enough to do their best work. Without strong leadership, even the best teams can become disengaged, misaligned, or outright dysfunctional.

A culture of success isn’t just something that happens—it’s intentionally built through how managers lead, communicate, and set expectations on a daily basis. And that’s where the real innovation and true synergy are born.

The Myth of the Lone Genius vs. The Reality of Strong Teams

The rogue genius trope is a compelling story, but in real life, the most successful startups aren’t built by solo visionaries—they’re built by well-led teams. Michael Jordan said it best:

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

Good managers understand how to harness the intelligence, creativity, and drive of their teams without letting egos get in the way. They create a culture where ideas aren’t just tossed into the void, but systematically evaluated, refined, and executed.

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The Future of Startup Leadership: Hybrid Experts

The truth is, today, domain expertise alone is simply not enough to reach the goal.

I come from the wear-the-same-black-hoodie-every-day, hustle-and-innovate class of startup culture. When we were starting out, there was still an idealistic twinkle in our eyes about changing the world by disrupting and revolutionizing the corporate world. We thought innovation was everything.

At this point in my career, I’ve spent about half my learning focused on management and leadership and the other half(the earlier half) on marketing theory, practice, and application. And the further I go, the more convinced I am that the new class of unicorns especially in early stage, emergent startup spaces, will be born from good solid management shepherding our boldest rogue geniuses to true greatness.

Early-stage managers need to possess both deep domain expertise and a strong foundation in management theory and leadership best practices to get over the line. The best ideas in the world mean nothing if they’re not brought to their highest potential by people who know how to execute.

As Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor wrote in the Harvard Business Review:

“Why should hard-nosed executives care about management theory? Because it works.”

Good management isn’t a soft skill—it’s a strategic advantage. The startups that will survive and thrive aren’t just the ones with the biggest ideas. They’re the ones with the strongest teams, led by managers who understand how to translate vision into execution, strategy into action, and talent into results.

If you want your startup to succeed, hire great managers. Invest in leadership that understands the value of creating systems that consistently produce big bold innovations rather than relying on random strokes of genius and insights from individuals.

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