People & Culture: Building Your Startup Dream Team
Build the team, culture, and leadership foundation your startup needs to grow and scale.
What you’ll learn
In these courses, I tackle one of the most underestimated drivers of startup success: your people. Drawing on my experience leading nine startups, I reveal what it takes to build a world-class team, shape a strong company culture, and lead effectively through every stage of growth. You’ll learn how and when to add sales and marketing, foster innovation, and scale your team without losing the agility that sets startups apart. This isn’t theory—it’s a practical coaching guide built on decades of real-world leadership.
I’ve built multiple high-performing teams—and made every hiring mistake along the way—so you don’t have to. I share proven frameworks for recruiting exceptional talent, creating a culture that fuels innovation, and developing leadership at every level of your organization. You’ll discover exactly when to hire key roles, how to align your team with company objectives, and the difficult but essential art of firing fast when necessary. The team you build will ultimately determine your startup’s ceiling—and I’ll help you raise it.
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People & Culture Courses
Behind every successful startup is a team of people who chose to believe in the mission — and keeping that belief alive as a company grows is one of the most underappreciated jobs of a founder. This introduction sets the stage for the entire People & Culture track, framing why the human dimension of a startup is just as strategic as the product or the finances. Founders get a grounding in what the discipline of people and culture actually encompasses, why it can't be delegated away or left to chance, and how the decisions made in the earliest days — about who joins, how they're treated, and what's tolerated — shape the company's identity for years to come.
Free lesson: • Introduction
Culture isn't a ping-pong table or a mission statement on the wall — it's the invisible operating system that determines how a team makes decisions, treats each other, and shows up under pressure. This course gives founders a comprehensive foundation for building culture intentionally from day one. Starting with why culture is a strategic asset — not a soft afterthought — founders learn how to define and embed values that shape real behavior, then create the conditions where innovation and collaboration thrive naturally. The result is a team that doesn't just execute, but genuinely believes in what they're building together.
Lessons included: • Importance of Company Culture • Creating a Positive Work Environment and Values • Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Collaboration
A startup's culture sets the tone — but the team determines whether it wins. This course digs into the human side of building a company: how to recruit people who are not only skilled but who genuinely elevate the team around them, and why diversity of background and perspective isn't just a value statement but a competitive advantage. Equally important, founders learn the discipline of letting go — how to recognize when someone isn't the right fit, and how to handle departures swiftly, fairly, and in a way that protects the team's trust and momentum. Great companies are built by great people, and this course shows founders how to find them, keep them, and when necessary, move on.
Lessons included: • Building a Strong and Diverse Team • How to Hire (and Fire)
Hiring a great early team is one challenge — keeping everyone rowing in the same direction as the company grows is an entirely different one. This course addresses the inflection point where informal coordination breaks down and intentional structure becomes essential. Founders learn how to align expanding teams with evolving company objectives so that every individual understands how their work connects to the bigger mission, and how to manage the growing complexity of people, processes, and communication without losing the speed and focus that made the startup successful in the first place. Scaling a team well is what separates companies that grow fast from those that grow right.
Lessons included: • Aligning Teams with Company Objectives • Managing and Scaling Your Startup Team
Growth doesn't happen by accident — it happens when the right leaders are in place at the right time. This course helps founders make two of the most consequential hiring decisions they'll face: when to bring in a dedicated marketing function and what to expect from it, and when the moment is right to hire a sales leader rather than continuing to sell personally. Founders learn to recognize the signals that indicate it's time to hand off these critical roles, what to look for in the people they hire, and how to set those leaders up to succeed without losing founder-level intensity in the market.
Lessons included: • Marketing and When You Need It • When Do You Need That Sales Leader?
As a startup scales, the question of who leads what — and how — becomes a genuine strategic decision, not just an org chart exercise. This course tackles one of the most debated structural choices in early-stage companies: whether a startup needs both a CEO and a COO, and if so, when and why. Founders examine the distinct roles, how responsibilities should be divided to avoid overlap and gaps, and what the right leadership pairing looks like at different stages of growth. The goal is a leadership structure that amplifies the founder's strengths, fills critical blind spots, and keeps the company moving fast without losing coordination.
Lesson included: • Does a Startup Need Both a CEO and COO?
Building a company is ultimately an act of leadership over people — and the founders who get this right create organizations that outlast any single product, market cycle, or funding environment. This concluding lesson brings the People & Culture track full circle, synthesizing the key lessons across culture, hiring, scaling, and leadership structure into a coherent philosophy founders can carry forward. It's a moment to reflect on how far the team has come, reinforce the habits and mindsets that sustain healthy organizations over the long term, and commit to the ongoing, intentional work of putting people at the center of everything the startup does.
Free lesson: • Key learnings and next steps
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*Introductory price: $689