Sample frameDay 326·Entrepreneurship · People

You already have a model for how people get employed here. You've just never written it down.

Entrepreneurship.

The Founding Blueprint

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The question

Think about the last three people you brought into this business: what did you actually decide on — the skills they could use from Monday, the potential you thought you saw, or whether they felt like one of us — and if those three answers don't match, whose model is the company really running on?

The idea

James Baron and Michael Hannan, both then at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, began interviewing the founders of Silicon Valley technology start-ups in 1994. The Stanford Project on Emerging Companies eventually tracked nearly two hundred of them to the middle of 2001, and they wrote up what they'd found as 'Organizational Blueprints for Success in High-Tech Start-Ups' in the California Management Review in 2002. The first result surprised them. Founders in one valley, one decade and a narrow set of industries did not share a template; they held five, sorted by three questions. What attaches a person to the firm — the money, the work itself, or the group? What do you select on — skills, long-term potential, or fit? And how does work get coordinated — your own oversight, formal process, professional standards, or peers? The combinations cluster into star, engineering, commitment, bureaucracy and autocracy. Engineering was the most common of the five at founding. Commitment — attachment through belonging, selection on fit, control by peers — was held by about one founder in seven, and those companies turned out to be the fastest to go public and the least likely to fail. Autocracy firms were the most likely to perish. The trap sits later, in the change: a founder swaps the model for reasons that sound sensible in the room, and the company pays for it in exactly the people it needed to keep.

The framework

01
Three questions decide which of the five you're holding.
Baron and Hannan never asked a founder to pick a label; they worked it out from three answers. What holds someone here — the money, the work itself, or the people around them? What did you genuinely decide on — the skills they could use from Monday, the potential you believed you saw, or fit with the group? And how does the work get coordinated — you watching it, written process, professional standards, or peers keeping each other honest? Answer all three about your last two hires rather than about your intentions, and the combination usually lands on one of the five, whether or not you ever chose it.
02
Write down the one you're already running.
A blueprint doesn't have to be declared to be operating. It's already in what you praise out loud, who gets the interesting work, and who quietly stopped being invited — Day 171 puts the general version of this as culture being a record of what you attended to. Baron and Hannan found the founder's original imprint bore more on how much administrative weight a company carried years later than the model its sitting chief executive held. So write yours as three lines, hand it separately to your two longest-serving people, and see what comes back.
03
Why commitment held up, and where it jams.
The association the authors found makes sense of the result: founders who meant to compete on service, marketing or customer relationships were significantly more likely to start on commitment, because enduring customer relationships are carried by people who stay. But the same paper is honest about the cost, and you should be too. Firms founded on commitment were significantly less likely to bring women into core scientific and technical roles — the emphasis on fitting in working as a barrier as they grew. That's a real ceiling on scale, and it isn't a footnote you get to skip.
04
The expensive move is the switch, not the choice.
About half the companies never changed blueprint, another three in ten moved on one dimension only — but those that did change were roughly 2.3 times as likely to fail afterwards, and turnover rose hardest among the longest-serving. Set that beside the next morning of this elective, where Greiner argues every phase of growth ends in a crisis caused by the method that produced it. Both hold: the founding model has a ceiling, and Baron and Hannan price crossing it. So the instruction isn't never change. It's choose for the company you intend to have in three years, then move one dimension deliberately, on a date, out loud.

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