Why Smart Founders Are Moving Beyond "Many Hats" to True Ownership
This article draws on multiple "Why Work Here" interviews with founders and CEOs about what makes startup cultures succeed long-term—specifically, how true ownership differs from simply juggling multiple responsibilities.
"If there is a bug, they will be the first one to jump and fix it," Sagiv Ofek, founder of Liblab, explains, describing how his team approaches their work. "They feel that it's their baby."
The comment comes up naturally during his conversation with Wellfound about company culture, but it lands with unexpected force. In the careful choreography of startup advice, where founders speak in measured tones about "execution" and "product-market fit," Ofek's language feels startlingly intimate. He's talking about code and features and bug fixes, but he might as well be describing parenthood.
This is ownership culture, and it's fundamentally different from the startup gospel of "wearing many hats." While the latter is about tactical flexibility, the former runs deeper, touching something primal about how humans relate to their work. It's the difference between helping someone move apartments and helping them build a home.
The distinction matters more than ever as startups navigate an increasingly complex talent landscape. When capital is scarce and every hire counts, the companies that understand ownership aren't just building better cultures—they're creating competitive advantages that compound over time.
The Psychology of "It's Their Baby"
There's a reason Ofek's metaphor resonates. Research in behavioral psychology shows that feelings of ownership trigger what's known as the "endowment effect." We value things more highly simply because we feel they belong to us. But in startup contexts, this psychological quirk becomes something more powerful: a driver of intrinsic motivation that doesn't depend on external rewards.
Consider Amanda DeLuca founder of Riley, who describes debugging code at 1 AM on a Saturday night: "Sometimes, like last night, I was up at like 1 a.m. trying to debug something. Every so often you might get a really late night slack for me on like a Saturday night. And it's not because my expectation is that you're going to respond to me at that point. That was just the time that worked for me."
She's not describing the grind of entrepreneurship or responding to external pressure. She's describing someone protecting something precious, something that belongs to her in a way that transcends typical founder obligations.
This emotional connection transforms everything about how work gets done. Andrew Just, founder of Train Fitness, captures what this looks like at scale: "We're not a culture of just pushing JIRA tickets through and checking things off boxes. Every single designer, engineer, business analyst, whatever it is, my expectation is that people are thinking outside the box, seeing around corners. And in order to do that, you have to have this owner mindset."
Beyond the Hat Collection
The "many hats" metaphor has become startup gospel, but it fundamentally misunderstands human motivation. Hats are things you wear and remove; ownership is something that becomes part of you.
Kelley Halpin, CEO of Mesa, puts it bluntly, and says that at an early stage startup: "Everybody here is an owner. We all act like that. We all recruit... we all fill the gaps, right? There's never enough people."
The caring isn't incidental. It's the whole point. Without it, you're left with what organizational psychologists call "job crafting": people adapting their roles to find meaning. But ownership culture flips the script. Instead of helping people find meaning in their work, it helps them find work that already means something to them.
This isn't about title inflation or making everyone feel important. It's about creating conditions where people's natural protective instincts can attach to something meaningful.
The Delicate Balance of Autonomy and Accountability
The most sophisticated ownership cultures understand that autonomy without accountability is chaos, while accountability without autonomy is micromanagement. The sweet spot requires what different founders approach in their own ways.
Arjun Kannan, co founder of Residesk, startup describes their philosophy: "One of the things that we care about the most and we put on our job descriptions everywhere is just everybody here is a high autonomy builder. And that sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but it just basically means they can get things done. And the thing we try to do is hire good people and get out of the way."
This creates what Han Wang co-founder at Mintlify , describes as "high ownership, high responsibility." People get the freedom to shape their work, but they also live with the results.
Jacob Peters, founder of Superpower, takes this even further by eliminating traditional role boundaries:
"We are a product engineering driven culture. So we don't have any PMs on the team. All of our engineers and our technical co-founder and CTO, they basically are the PMs in a sense. And the reason for that is we want to collapse the talent stack and have it so that the people who are building the thing are also the ones designing, scoping, speccing, and kind of ideating on the thing."
In most companies, this would be dismissed as chaos. But when ownership culture is working, it becomes something closer to orchestrated emergence. Individual decisions align because everyone is optimizing for the same outcome.
The Signal in the Hiring Noise
For founders, the crucial question becomes: How do you identify people who will naturally embrace this kind of ownership? The answer isn't found in traditional credentials or polished interview performances.
Andrew from Train Fitness has developed a particularly sophisticated approach: "My view is every single person that we work with, we are very careful when growing our team to ensure that people coming on have this true 100% owner mindset. That doesn't mean you need to use the app seven days a week and be a power lifter, but it probably does mean you need to be excited about the product. You need to be eager to talk to customers, to understand feedback."
The distinction he's drawing cuts to the heart of ownership thinking. It's not about working longer hours or blind loyalty. It's about genuine intellectual and emotional engagement with the problems the company is solving.
Kevin Leland, founder of Halo looks for intrinsic motivation above all else:
"There's not going to be somebody who's kind of like watching over you as a startup, especially like a remote startup. And so we want people who want to do above and beyond and do an excellent job just because that's who they are."
Natural owners take responsibility. They focus on what they could have controlled rather than what was beyond their influence. This isn't about finding people who never make mistakes. It's about finding people who own their mistakes completely.
Mission as the Multiplier
What amplifies ownership culture is a genuine mission that connects with people on an emotional level. When the work matters beyond building a successful company, ownership stops being something you have to create—it becomes inevitable.
Kelley from Mesa articulates this clearly:
"We've got an amazing mission that people believe in, they know is gonna make the world a better place. Two, it's gonna deliver a huge generational business. Like you can't have one without the other. Like if this is anything less than a hundred billion dollar business, we've probably wasted our time."
He's describing the intersection of purpose and ambition that makes ownership feel both meaningful and worthwhile. When people genuinely care about the problem being solved, ownership becomes natural rather than manufactured.
Most founders write mission statements that sound impressive but don't actually motivate anyone. Real mission is personal, it's when the problem you're solving genuinely bothers you if it goes unfixed.
The Operational Infrastructure of Ownership
Creating ownership culture requires more than the right people and a compelling mission. It demands operational systems that support autonomous decision-making rather than undermining it.
Jacob from Superpower has institutionalized this through documentation and decision-making processes:
"We over document and we're always outlining everything in a written first format. Writing is forcing function for clarity of thought. And then having that forum for multiple people who are going to be involved in a decision to have the ability to notion comment back and forth on different aspects of it, it's like way faster and higher fidelity."
This level of operational thoughtfulness ensures that everyone has the context they need to make ownership-level decisions rather than simply following instructions. It's the difference between hiring hands and hiring minds.
Sean Kelly, CEO of Amperon, focuses on what he calls "surety and importance":
"If you can lead by managing someone's surety and importance then everything else pretty much falls into place. From a surety standpoint that is you know what success looks like and you know how to achieve your goal. And then your importance is like, I think you're smart. I think you're special. I'm glad to be working with you."
When Ownership Goes Wrong
Ownership culture isn't without risks, and the most honest founders acknowledge the trade-offs involved.
Kapil Kale from Tremendous learned this lesson the hard way during a period of rapid cultural change: "Realistically, if the values of the company or the operating principles of the company have changed meaningfully, some meaningful percentage of the folks who had joined before didn't sign up for that. And you're going to have to part ways. We parted ways with probably like eight to 10 people over the course of my first seven months there."
The process was painful but necessary.
"The net result of it was like the people that were left were like really bought into this culture and each additional person that we brought on like added to this and it created this consistency of operating environment."
The key insight is being intentional about where you apply ownership principles and where you need more structure. Not every decision should be pushed down, and not every role benefits from complete autonomy. The art lies in understanding which decisions require ownership thinking and which require consistency and process.
The Future of Work
While ownership culture might seem uniquely suited to startups, it represents something larger—a fundamental shift in how people want to relate to their work. In an era where traditional job security is increasingly elusive, psychological ownership of meaningful work becomes more valuable than the stability of a traditional role.
For founders building the companies of tomorrow, the question isn't whether to embrace ownership culture—it's how quickly they can build the systems, hire the right people, and create the conditions where ownership naturally flourishes.
Because in the end, wearing many hats is just about getting tasks done. But acting like an owner? That's about building something that lasts.
Final Tips for Founders, Recruiters, and Job Seekers
Founders — Look for ownership signals in how candidates talk about past projects. Ask: "What's something you built that you're proud of?" Listen for stories where they initiated something, disagreed with direction, or invested personal time to prove a point. These behaviors predict ownership thinking better than any technical assessment.
Recruiters — When sourcing candidates, look beyond job titles to find people who have taken initiative outside their defined roles. Side projects, internal tools they've built, or initiatives they've driven are stronger ownership indicators than traditional resume markers like prestigious companies or advanced degrees.
Job Seekers — During interviews, ask founders about their transparency practices and decision-making processes. Companies with real ownership cultures will have specific examples of how information flows and how employees shape company direction. If they can only offer vague promises about "empowerment," that's a red flag.
This article was created using quotes from multiple episodes of "Why Work Here," a series in which Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, has honest, behind-the-scenes conversations with founders, executives, and employees about why their companies are worth joining. [Click here to watch more Why Work Here.