I asked 6 exited founders what they regret most.
Every single one said the same thing.
🏗️Not equity splits.
🏗️Not cap table dilution.
🏗️Not product bets gone wrong.
They all said this:
“I waited too long to fire.”
— The underperforming cofounder
— The toxic early hire
— The “loyal” friend who couldn’t scale
— The mediocre VP who kept promising “next quarter”
Each one knew.
Deep down, they knew.
But they delayed. Rationalized. Gave more chances.
Why?
Because it’s painful.
Because it feels disloyal.
Because we confuse kindness with inaction.
But here’s the founder truth no one tweets:
Every month you delay a hard firing is a month of compounding damage.
👎Morale drops.
👎A-players leave.
👎Velocity tanks.
And your credibility quietly dies.
One founder told me:
🎇“I lost 12 months of runway and 3 top engineers because I couldn’t pull the trigger on one person. That mistake cost me $10M.”
Another said:
🎇“The day I finally fired them, the whole company breathed again.”
Firing isn’t cruelty.
🎇It’s clarity.
And clarity is leadership.
If you’re reading this and someone popped into your head—
You probably already know.
Startups don’t die from one big mistake.
They die from 100 delayed decisions.
