Founder's trap

The founder's trap is the situation in which a founder is so central to the company that nothing moves without their involvement. The involvement that was a strength in the early days becomes the biggest brake on further growth. In English this is called the founder's trap.

You recognize the trap by a few signals. The team waits for your approval before making decisions. Everyone comes to you for context, because you are the only one who sees the whole picture. Busyness feels like progress, while much of that busyness is coordination and not actual progress.

The cause is not a character flaw, but math. With ten employees there are 45 lines of communication; with fifty there are already 1,225. Somewhere between 30 and 50 employees the informal system breaks, because the overview that once fit inside the founder's head no longer fits. The way out is to make the overview explicit and visible in a system, so that the company runs on that structure instead of on the founder.

Read more in The founder's trap: from bottleneck to builder.