Jason M. Lemkin says startups that don't clearly assign founder roles end up escalating every decision to a committee, which kills momentum. The fix: give each founder ownership of a specific area like product, tech, or sales. Only the biggest decisions get debated together.
This was not clearly defining roles and responsibilities between the founders. So it's very common that in the early stage, everyone does everything, and you don't really need strict roles and responsibilities. But after you raise money and you have a couple of employees, suddenly there are some hard decisions to make. Who's going to lead product? Who's going to lead tech? Who's going to lead sales? Who's going to be responsible for recruiting? It's often the case that teams will not make these decisions, and then every decision, large or small, will have to go into some kind of founder committee to get resolved. And I think one of the best things that good startups do early on is define responsibilities and make it so that only the most important decisions end up being something that's debated.
