Team & Culture
Hire, lead, and build a great founding team
Learn how to find a co-founder, make your first hires, structure equity, set OKRs, manage remote teams, and build a culture that attracts and retains the people who will determine your outcome.
Stock options give employees the right to buy company shares at a fixed strike price. ISOs and NSOs are the two main types used by startups.
A vesting cliff is a threshold period — typically one year — before which no equity vests, protecting companies from early team departures.
Equity vesting is how founders and employees earn their shares over time, ensuring long-term alignment between the team and the company's success.
How to find, evaluate, and lock in the right co-founder — where to look, what to test for, and the conversations you must have before signing anything.
A step-by-step guide to running 1:1 meetings that build trust, surface blockers, and help you develop every person on your team.
Radical Candor is Kim Scott's management framework that combines caring personally for people with challenging them directly and honestly.
Culture isn't ping-pong tables — it's what behaviors get rewarded and punished. Here's how founders actually build it.
An ESOP is a reserved pool of equity set aside to grant stock options to employees, advisors, and early hires as non-cash compensation.
Good leaver and bad leaver clauses define how a departing employee's unvested and vested equity is treated based on why they left.
A PIP is a formal document that outlines an employee's performance gaps and sets a time-bound plan to correct them before termination.
Learn how to create a fair, transparent compensation framework that helps you hire, retain, and build trust across your startup team.
A practical guide to hiring your first employees — how to define the roles, run the process, set comp, and avoid the mistakes that derail early teams.
Understand every component of a startup equity offer — and learn exactly what to negotiate, what to ask, and how to evaluate your upside.
Situational Leadership teaches managers to adapt their style — directing, coaching, supporting, or delegating — based on each employee's needs.
How to structure stock option grants for early hires — covering grant sizes, vesting, strike prices, and how to communicate equity fairly.
Remote is the default for software startups in 2025. Here's how to build culture, hire globally, and run operations across time zones.