Early stage decisions are a different job

The same decision, a different job

In a large company, a significant decision has many owners. A senior hire involves a hiring manager, a human resources partner, a pay band, an interview panel and a sequence of approvals. The hard part is getting those people aligned.

In an early or growth stage company, the same hire has one owner. The CEO makes the call, perhaps with a recruiter, always with the runway in view. The hard part is that there is no one to share it with.

Both are hard, but in different ways.

The advice for CEOs of large companies

The best-known research on how CEOs spend their time studies large companies. When Harvard’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked the CEOs of companies averaging more than $13 billion in revenue, they found days spent mostly in meetings, with about a third of the time spent reacting to issues as they unfolded. Their main advice was to keep a clear personal agenda, because without one the loudest constituencies take over.

That is the large-company problem: coordination. The decisions are shared, so the work is alignment. The tools built for it follow: decision rights, escalation paths, subcommittees, consensus.

The early stage problem: no one else can make the call

An early stage CEO faces a different problem. There is no head of regulatory, no head of clinical, no head of marketing. Data is thin. Every choice is tied to cash runway. A pricing question, a claim question and a hiring question can land on the CEO’s desk in the same afternoon, and each one needs a decision, not a meeting.

In our experience, the decision-making burden comes less from the number of meetings than from the number of decisions that no one else in the company is equipped to make. That load does not shrink with better scheduling. It shrinks only as the company builds people and systems that can carry part of it.

Why large-company practices misfire

The practices built for large companies, designed to enhance coordination, can slow down a company that needs to move. A subcommittee for a decision that one qualified person can make adds time and nothing else. The reverse mistake is just as common: a fast growing company keeps routing every decision to the CEO long after others could make them.

The startup world argues about this openly. In 2024, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham described the advice Airbnb’s Brian Chesky received as the company grew: “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.” Chesky followed it, and in Graham’s words, “the results were disastrous.” Graham called the alternative “founder mode”: a CEO who stays close to the work, predicting that “skip-level” meetings with people several levels down “will become the norm.” The essay set off a long debate about how much a founder should let go. Graham himself conceded the limit: “Obviously founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20.”

In our experience, the useful question is narrower. It is not whether the CEO delegates, but which decisions stay with the CEO and which ones get delegated and when.

What to do differently

Three practices help an early or growth stage CEO handle the decision-making load.

1. Sort decisions by reversibility. Most decisions are two-way doors and should be made fast. A few are one-way doors and deserve the CEO’s time. (See The few decisions you can’t undo.)
2. Keep a short personal agenda. A handful of priorities for the next quarter, written down, so the most urgent issue of the day does not set the direction.
3. Decide which decisions stay with you for now. Then build the capacity for everything else: the hire, the advisor, the operating cadence that lets someone else decide well.

The third practice is the one that changes as the company grows. Molly Graham, who helped scale Facebook and the software company Quip, tells early employees that to grow as fast as the company, “you have to give away your job every couple months.” The CEO is not exempt. The executive search firm Egon Zehnder describes the same shift at the top, from “founder-centric execution to shared ownership.” Revisit which decisions stay with you at each company milestone.