Patrick Collison on why being consensus-oriented is a common startup mistake

“Between 5 and 50 people I think we were much too consensus-oriented. We of course weren’t completely consensus oriented—we couldn’t have gotten anything done if we were. But I think we biased too much in that direction, and I think that’s a relatively common mistake.”

Patrick explains that in the early days of a startup there isn’t much of a need for formal decision-making mechanisms. But as you grow, there is.

“The higher order piece of advice, and perhaps I’m over-extrapolating from our personal experience, would be to when you hit a certain size—I’m just going to say 10 people for the sake of simplicity—I think you need to adjust more deliberately to being quite firmly non-consensus based. Nobody likes the idea of being hierarchical. That sounds pejorative. But in some sense hierarchical.”

And as he points out, it’s a delicate balancing act with no definitive formula:

“On the one hand, you want to really prioritize speed and agility, which involves being somewhat hierarchical… But on the other hand, you really want people to have this strong ownership mentality and real sense that they can cause things to change or identify problems or inject new ideas even in unrelated areas.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Running Your Company by Patrick Collison“ (Oct 2018)