Early stage is a knife fight. You don't have time for people who can't or won't ship. By "non-deliverables," I mean managers who only meet, strategists who only advise, and seniors who refuse to learn modern tools (including LLMs) to increase their own throughput. Letting them crowd the product is exactly how fast companies get slow.

The Math

Speed compounds. Every shipped change either tightens or lengthens your feedback loop. The moment you add hands that don't produce artifacts (code, docs, experiments, decisions) you introduce decision latency, context thrash, and rework. That drag isn't linear; it compounds until slow quarters become slow years. Protect the loop or lose the year.

You don't cure drag with more opinions. You cure it with fewer, accountable owners who carry work end to end. If someone can't own the good and the bad from the first sketch to the rollback, they don't belong near the critical path. The operating lens is simple: who owns it, ships it, measures it.

Zero-to-One or Zero-to-None

That's why you bias the room toward zero-to-one builders. People who've actually taken something from nothing to shipping don't theorize trade-offs; they've lived them. They know when to cut scope, when to harden, and when to risk it. They write, instrument, and learn weekly.

And in 2025, that also means being LLM-literate. Today's builders use models to draft specs, stub code, generate tests, set up event schemas, and write first-pass docs, then review like pros. If a senior hire treats LLMs as novelty, they're opting out of the modern toolchain and, by extension, your required speed.

Founders: Pick a Lane

Founders aren't exempt. A CEO dabbling in design or code is either a superpower or a liability. It's a superpower when you take an end-to-end slice (brief, build, test, ship, measure) and you do it on a cadence. It's a liability when you parachute in with "one more tweak" energy and no time to carry it over the line. If you can't commit maker hours, stay out of the editor and work the levers only you can: focus, capital, distribution, recruiting.

How Damage Shows Up

You can see the damage of non-deliverables in how the work feels. Narrative starts to displace evidence; meetings substitute for artifacts and "insight" becomes vibes. Scope creeps because "must-have" ideas arrive without owners. Processes bloom before product-market fit and you find yourself managing the org instead of the learning rate. Shadow QA emerges: endless polish cycles from people who won't maintain the code they're "protecting." Every one of these is friction that slows learning.

Red Flags When Hiring (And What You Want Instead)

Hiring exposes this quickly.

People who say "I lead teams; I don't code/design anymore" are telling you they won't touch the work. Look instead for senior ICs who ship weekly and mentor by shipping.

Allergic to LLMs usually means proud of manual toil. Look for safe, repeatable workflows that increase personal throughput.

Portfolios that are all decks and no artifacts signal strategy cosplay. Look for repos, shipped features, dashboards, experiments.

"I optimize process first" is process theater before PMF. Look for lightweight guardrails and a bias to release and measure.

If someone can't describe a rollback, they lack scar tissue. Look for kill switches, feature flags, clear post-mortems.

Talking CRO without events is metric theater. Look for real schemas, funnels, and cohorts they built.

And "I don't do customer calls" means product in the abstract. Look for regular interviews with clips that became shipped changes.

Rules That Keep Speed Alive

The rules that keep speed alive are boring on purpose:

Single-threaded ownership. Every initiative has one name on it.

Artifacts over airtime. PRs, ADRs, specs, and dashboards beat meetings; if it isn't written, it's just opinion.

Ship behind flags so winners can be promoted and losers killed fast.

Make changes event-first. If we can't measure it, it didn't happen.

Keep a weekly release rhythm because cadence beats heroics.

Treat LLMs as hygiene for drafts, stubs, tests, and checklists.

Keep docs as a real surface: a 15-minute quickstart, a living changelog, and a "how we ship" page that stays true.

How to Screen for Builders

Screening for builders doesn't require a six-week gauntlet.

A paid, time-boxed build test. Six to eight hours on one "aha" flow with a flag, events, and a short doc tells you more than weeks of interviews. Grade for completion over theatrics.

Ask for three artifacts: a one-page spec, an AARRR-aligned event schema, and a rollback plan. Judge quality over length.

Do a live critique with a real PRD and ask what they'd cut, ship, and measure in week one.

Watch them interview a user for ten minutes and turn it into a concrete change list.

Have them demo an LLM workflow: how they'd use a model to go faster without shipping junk.

Roles to Postpone

There are roles you should postpone until you're truly ready. The careerist manager optimizes org charts, not outcomes. The Strategist™ collects frameworks and leaves no fingerprints. The brand-only founder wants to "approve" code and design without ever owning a slice end-to-end. The tool tourist rotates stacks so fast nothing compounds. All of them trade momentum for optics.

Fewer People, Fewer Seams

As I've gotten older, I value fewer people and fewer seams. Not because collaboration is bad, but because compound losses are real: every extra reviewer adds delay; every handoff adds entropy; every cross-team dependency adds calendar time. Small, serious teams with real ownership beat big, impressive teams with soft accountability. Fewer chefs, hotter pan.

Make It Cultural

Make it cultural so you don't have to refight it every sprint.

Write down who's allowed to touch the product; if you don't ship artifacts, you don't gate those who do.

Publish a crisp definition of done (metrics, docs, rollout, rollback) and hold everyone to it.

Run post-mortems that name reality without blame but with full accountability.

Protect maker time with two or three no-meeting blocks a week.

Promote from shipping so influence follows outcomes, not tenure.

The Operating System

This is the operating system I bring into early-stage teams: single-threaded ownership, LLM-first workflows, flags and events by default, a weekly ship cadence, and the cultural guardrails that keep non-deliverables away from the critical path. We ship real code, wire measurement, and let momentum do the selling.

If you want that in a contained burst, I run a six-week growth engineering sprint with withSeismic. Fewer chefs. Faster loops. Outcomes you can point at.