Winning Teams Hire Founders

The best companies aren’t run by people doing jobs. They’re run by people acting like the company is theirs. High urgency. Deep customer obsession. A willingness to push far beyond any job description.

I realized this early at Lovable. From the start it was obvious that everyone cared about the product and the company vision with an intensity I hadn’t seen elsewhere. It was as if each person behaved like they were a founder themselves. And that changed everything.

Most people don’t get that being a “founder” isn’t about the title. It’s a mindset. And once you pick it up, building stops feeling like work. It becomes fun, almost addictive. You care more, you improve faster, and you end up outperforming everyone else.

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The Hiring Trap

The conventional wisdom says that as companies grow, they need to specialize. Clear roles, narrow expertise, tidy swim lanes. It sounds professional. But in practice it kills the very energy that made the company succeed in the first place.

Regular employees wait for direction. Founder-minded employees create their own. They optimize for the mission, not just their function.

Why don’t more companies hire this way? Because it’s harder. You can check whether someone knows a specific tool. You can’t check ownership as easily. Hiring processes optimize for what’s easy to measure, not for what matters.

This is why so many teams feel mechanical. They’re full of people optimized for doing their jobs, not for building the company.

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The Founder Type

The irony is that people with a founder mindset rarely look like perfect candidates on paper. They’re generalists. They’ve switched between roles. They’ve run side projects, sometimes unsuccessfully. They care more about outcomes than titles. To a hiring manager, that looks like inconsistency. In reality, it’s initiative.

At Lovable, this mindset is what keeps the company in motion. Everyone behaves as if the company’s success is their personal mission. And when enough people do that, momentum compounds. The company stops being something you work at and becomes something you push forward, so strongly that slowing down doesn’t even feel like an option.

Hiring “founders” doesn’t literally mean only people who’ve started companies. It means people who think like owners: urgent, customer-obsessed, unwilling to let problems slide. People who bend reality instead of waiting for instructions.

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Why It Works

The reason hiring founders works is that it erases the line between thinking and doing.

Employees tend to wait for strategy to trickle down. They ask what they should do. Founders collapse the gap. They notice what must be done and simply start doing it. That loop is tighter, faster, and more reliable than any org chart.

This difference compounds. With employees, momentum depends on instructions flowing smoothly through the hierarchy. With founders, momentum comes from everywhere at once. It’s self-propelling.

Hiring employees is like building a machine. Each part does one job, and if something breaks, the whole thing stalls until the right part is replaced. Hiring founders is like starting a fire. It spreads. It consumes fuel wherever it finds it, but doesn’t need instructions to keep burning. And once it’s burning, it pulls everything else into its orbit.

To a manager, this looks like chaos since roles blur, debates flare, projects appear out of nowhere. But that chaos is the source of the energy and it’s what makes a five-person startup dangerous to incumbents with ten thousand employees.

Companies rarely die from too much chaos. They die from too much order. The moment people stop acting like owners and start waiting for permission, the company begins to ossify.

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What We Don’t Know Yet

So far all we have are experiments by individual companies, and the lessons of founders who stumbled into this pattern. But one conclusion is already obvious: the companies that win don’t just hire employees.

They hire people who act like the company is theirs.

I know this because I’ve seen it firsthand. Lovable didn’t scale because everyone stayed in their lane. It scaled because people treated the company’s success like their own. That mindset — more than process, more than specialization — is what keeps the product leaping forward instead of inching along.

Winning teams don’t hire employees. They hire founders.

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