Snyder: Founders Wrongly Blame Early Teams for Failing to Scale
Dustin Snyder · Talking to the $25/hr Shop Floor Worker Beat Every Spreadsheet · Aug 4, 2026 · at 9:05
Dustin Snyder explains why early-stage employees appear to stall in growing companies, arguing that system-level shifts are often mistaken for personal incompetence.
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“A lot of the times you'll have founders who say, oh, like my original team can't scale with me, which, you know, sometimes that's correct, but a lot of times it's just a misdiagnosis. Like when growth starts to break things on the human side, founders tend to reach for this like person explanation, like, oh, my VP like topped out. Or this person can operate at this new altitude, but really like the environment mutated underneath that person and the conditions that they were succeeding in have disappeared.”
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