How entrepreneurial teams work, lead, and deliver results that last
Principles are often confused with values. The distinction matters.
On entrepreneurial teams, principles shape how you make decisions, respond to challenges, and ultimately create impact. They are often the difference between momentum and mediocrity.
There are 12 principles woven throughout my book, Impact—hard-won lessons from leading and working alongside entrepreneurial teams. Across my career, I’ve seen these principles consistently separate high-performing teams from the rest. Each one stands alone, but together they form a playbook for sustained performance.
Big things are never easy. They take time, effort, resilience, and faith. There will be awesome successes and moments of affirmation—but there will also be times when you just have to grind through uninspiring tasks, setbacks, or self-doubt.
If you believe in what you’re doing, if it connects with you deeply and calls to you rather than just interests you, you’ll have the capacity to see it through. If you don’t feel energized by what you’re doing on a good day, you probably don’t connect with it enough to get through the harder days.
Belief also shapes how you lead. Without it, leaders drift into “blown-by-the-wind” behavior: chasing the last idea in the room, whipsawing teams, and confusing activity with impact. Belief provides the internal filter that helps you discern what matters, process feedback, and remain consistent.
Do something you believe in. It is the foundation on which every other principle rests.
Just as you must believe in what you’re doing, you must surround yourself with people who believe in it too.
When teams share belief, they’re energized, resilient, and creative. Without it, they’re just punching the clock. And if that’s the norm, the issue is at the top—either the mission isn’t clear, impactful, or credible, or you’ve got too many people who don’t share the belief. Both require course correction.
Shared belief extends beyond your team. Early success—across customers, investors, advisors, and partners—depends on finding the people who believe what you believe and serving them well. As Simon Sinek says: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” (See his TED Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.”)
Culture is how your team operates. It’s not something you set—it’s something you do.
Your behavior sets the standard for your team, and you hold yourself and your team accountable to that standard. Everything follows from there. Codified values can remind people of the standard, but they don’t create it. What matters is who you are each day, in every interaction. People learn how to succeed by observing who gets promoted and who gets ignored, and they act accordingly.
The size of the gap between codified values and realized values is set by your own self-awareness, honesty, and reflection as a leader. Small gaps are normal. Large gaps breed dysfunction. Get real about your realized values. Hold yourself and your team to a standard that creates the culture you want.
Doing what you believe isn’t a continuous state of joy—it’s a well of resilience that helps you push through the hard things that inevitably arise. Doing the hard things when it comes to your mission, your project, or your team is integrity realized. There’s no bigger separator between real leaders and those in name than the willingness to act.
Some challenges are simply hard work: complexity, coordination, or time. But the truly hard things are almost always about people:
These moments require clarity, courage, and empathy. Seek input. Be human. But ultimately do what the mission demands.
Doing the hard thing also means not cutting corners when you’re impatient or uncomfortable. Helping a team transition quickly and effectively is the right kind of hard work. (Check out Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.)
Most people know how to prioritize what’s important. What’s rarer are the people who focus on what matters.
In resource-constrained environments—like startups—important things will slip through the cracks. But the things that matter cannot.
What matters is defined by deeper questions:
Doing what matters requires cutting through bureaucracy, momentum, and groupthink. Whenever you review a project or a to-do list, ask: Am I doing what matters? If not—discard the list.
You cannot manage what you don’t understand—and understanding comes from gathering the facts.
A recurring dysfunction across disciplines is working while misinformed—fueled by pure belief or an inability (or unwillingness) to see reality. The belief that matters is the one that inspires action. But to have productive impact, facts are essential.
It means diving into details:
Not all problems are worth equal attention. Use facts to separate what’s important from what truly matters—and notice when problems are growing fast.
Here’s one caveat: when the “small thing” is mission-critical, act, even if its apparent impact seems minor.
One of the most powerful ways to ensure everyone focuses on what matters is to connect the dots between mission and action. I call this The Cascade:
Mission → Strategy → Goals → Execution
Teams need clarity not only on what the mission is, but how their work advances it. A literal cog in a wheel is critical, but when people feel that way, it often means they don’t see the connection, or that the connection doesn’t exist.
Connecting the dots and ensuring every dot matters takes effort, but the payoff is a team of athletes energized and actively contributing to the mission. Invest in the right tools, people, and practices to scale your culture with your team so that everyone knows how and why they matter to the team and its mission.
Tension is often viewed negatively, but in entrepreneurial work, adeptly managing creative tensions is mastery.
A creative tension is the clashing of multiple acknowledged and often desired positive forces (e.g., principles, values, tactics, strategies, missions). When this tension materializes in practice, one of them must win—it may win always, or just sometimes as the circumstances dictate.
Creative tensions that are not openly embraced generally create the bad kind of tension for everyone involved. They can, however, become tools you leverage, rather than an environment you don’t control.
Here’s how:
For example, “Move!” and “Build to Last” are sometimes in conflict. Neither is wrong. Context matters, and mastery wins.
Iteration is a learned superpower. Nearly everything can be iterated—even films, scientific papers, policy, or large organizational change.
Elite achievers in every field follow the same pattern: experiment by asserting, get feedback, re-assert.
When someone tells me “we can’t iterate because we need to produce quality,” that’s precisely when I want to iterate the most. I define quality by effectiveness: does the created thing accomplish its intent for the audience? You can’t answer that without a feedback loop of some kind.
Iterating through quality milestones is an acquired skill—that’s the job.
The minute you know what you need to do—do it.
Whether it’s communicating a decision, letting someone go, reorganizing a team, or tackling any other challenge, extended transitions are usually harder on people than shorter ones. Put in the work with those affected to move them through change quickly.
There are two key parts to acting with urgency effectively:
Effective urgency lives in the tension between thinking before acting and learning by doing. Do your homework, but when “close” is good enough, move.
There are many temptations to distract you on the road to success: the allure of short-term gains, the overnight success of peers, or pressure from short-sighted patrons.
Tactics matter. The most successful operators I know integrate tactics and strategy well. But chasing the latest fad, or pivoting through a series of “home run” initiatives, is a common failure mode in bad startups.
To do something that truly matters, you have to:
Yes, become a great tactician, and do what you need to thrive. Embrace the occasional distraction, but know your high road and set a high bar for what earns your attention.
Building to last goes hand-in-hand with doing something you believe in. It also requires doing the hard things—including saying “no” to popular initiatives, ideas, and even people.
The highest performers I’ve known share one defining trait: they own their outcomes.
Ownership doesn’t mean doing everything yourself or micromanaging others. It means accepting full responsibility for your outcomes and your team’s outcomes.
Ownership at the highest level means you:
Ownership requires courage, especially when you make mistakes. But it is liberating, rewarding, and the fastest way to build a high-performing team that lives by the same credo.
These twelve principles form a practical operating philosophy for entrepreneurial teams:
Individually, each principle strengthens performance. Together, they create engines of innovation—teams capable of moving faster, solving harder problems, and delivering outsized impact.
