I had a call this week with a founder who was pissed off at his engineering team. He has a half-dozen developers and he's the one who keeps finding the bugs.
We're not talking about some forensic-level edge-case probing. He's literally just opening the product and using it ten times in a row. And things break. Stuff a user would hit on day one.
He was livid. And honestly, I get it. When you're building a brand new product, you assume everyone on the team cares as mush as you do.
But, please, startup CEOs, can we please stop expecting employees to take an ownership mentality?
There are three founders in his company: CEO, CTO, CPO. They own 70% of the company between them. Those six developers? Less than 4% combined. They don't have ownership. They have equity. Those are very different things.
An owner doesn't care what their job title says this week. An owner wakes up, opens the product, tests it twelve different ways, and pokes at the parts that have nothing to do with their current priority. Because it matters to them at a level that has nothing to do with a paycheck. They are defined by the success or failure of their product.
Your engineering team is only going to test as much as their work intersects with what they're shipping today. That sucks. We want everyone to care the way we do, but the motivations are very, very different.
And if they DID act like you want them to act? They wouldn't be working for your standup. They'd be off launching their own startup and raising a pre-seed.
So stop being shocked. Stop being pissed. That energy is wasted.
The job isn't to turn your engineers into founders. The job is to build the process that makes their proactivity unnecessary.
Smoke tests that run every day. A QA checklist somebody actually owns. A dogfooding rotation where one engineer a week has to use the product like a customer and log what breaks. Deterministic checks for the stuff that has to work, every time, no exceptions.
I tell my clients this about LLMs all the time — shrink the AI footprint to the smallest possible surface and make everything else deterministic. Same logic applies to your team. Shrink the surface area where you need someone to magically care, and use process to cover the rest.
Because the founders who survive aren't the ones with the most passionate teams. They're the ones who built systems that don't require passion to function.
Your team isn't you. They never will be. Build accordingly.