What if the biggest threat to your startup isn’t competition, funding or product-market fit, but your own management team? Hunter Hastings, co-author of Venture Mode, argues that companies rarely fail because they grow too fast. They fail when they lose the entrepreneurial behavior that made them work.
He calls it the Administration Trap: as organizations scale, speed gives way to bureaucracy and customer obsession gives way to internal process.
In this episode
- The earliest warning signs that bureaucracy is taking over
- Adding structure without losing entrepreneurial culture
- Why customer value, not internal metrics, should drive decisions
- Finding and empowering entrepreneurial leaders inside your company
- Why traditional MBA thinking often fails founders
- How AI is changing the economics of startups and leadership