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The founder may want to keep all the equity and control of all decision making, which would be particularly true for control-motivated founders.
I learned that leadership is all about taking in information and making a decision—shared information but not shared decisions.
prior relationships can have a substantial influence on decision-making structures.
One founder admitted that whenever people voiced an opinion or disagreed during a discussion, their relative equity stakes came to mind and affected how much weight he gave to their opinions.
Attracting hires and investors forces the founders to make difficult trade-offs, because the more scarce and valuable an outside resource is, the more its owner can demand for it.
To attract the best hires, for example, founders have to give up not only enough cash compensation and equity ownership but also some level of control over operational decisions; skilled people usually don’t like to be told what to do.
Although we outline this general sequence of stages, different functions within startups may go through them at different rates. The technical function, for example, may reach Stage 3 (mature) while the sales and marketing function is still in Stage 1 (startup).
