"Responsibility is for the mediocre." - Venom
I watched Venom 2 last week, and that line hit me like a truck. Not because it's profound cinema, but because it perfectly captures something I keep living through.
I've now joined startups at that critical stage between seed and Series A twice. Both times, everyone keeps asking me the same question: "How do you want to structure your first few weeks of onboarding?"
This question always gets me because I don't really do "onboarding" the way most people expect.
As marketing person at Arch, I simply started doing marketing on day three. As PM at MAIA, I started making product decisions by the end of my first week. No careful study periods. No comprehensive stakeholder interviews. No methodical process of "understanding everything before acting."
The responsible thing would be to spend 2-4 weeks reading documentation, meeting with every team member, understanding the full context, and getting properly aligned before making any decisions. That's what good managers do, right? Gather information, build consensus, then act.
But here's the problem: at a startup burning through runway between funding rounds, those 2-4 weeks might represent 5-10% of your total time before you either hit Series A metrics or shut down. When the math is that brutal, being responsible to the process means being irresponsible to survival.
So yes, when I make a product decision after seven days on the job, it's definitely not a pretty process. I don't have full context. I'm missing nuances. I'm probably stepping on toes. But it's the fastest way for me to deliver what actually matters: a working, great product that moves the needle on revenue.
“I’m actively irresponsible.” - Richard Reynman
If you only have 5 minutes: here are the key points
In fast-paced startups, traditional "responsible" onboarding is often counterproductive.
There are two kinds of responsibility: to the process (mediocre) and to the outcome (exceptional).
High-stakes environments reward speed, risk-taking, and action over caution and consensus.
GitLab's radical transparency during a massive outage is a case study in responsible risk-taking.
Great companies often emerge from decisions that violate conventional wisdom about leadership and management.
Two types of responsibility
Here's what I've learned: there are two completely different types of responsibility, and most people choose the wrong one.
Mediocre Responsibility means being responsible to the process. You're responsible to everyone's comfort, responsible for smooth transitions, responsible to avoiding conflict, responsible for following "best practices." This feels safe and professional. It makes you look like a good manager who cares about people and processes.
Exceptional Responsibility means being responsible for the outcome. You're responsible for survival, responsible for making hard calls fast, responsible for results not feelings, responsible for transformation. This feels dangerous and exposed. It makes you look like someone who breaks things and doesn't care about consensus.
The difference isn't just philosophical—it's mathematical. In a startup with 18 months of runway, spending a month on proper onboarding means using 6% of your total time before make-or-break metrics. That month might be the difference between hitting your Series A targets and closing down.
When disaster becomes opportunity
On January 31, 2017, GitLab faced every tech company's worst nightmare. A system administrator accidentally deleted 300GB of production database data, leaving only 4.5GB intact. Six hours of user data—projects, issues, merge requests, comments—vanished in seconds when an engineer ran rm -rf on the wrong server while trying to fix a replication lag.
The "responsible" crisis management playbook would have demanded: controlled messaging, limited information sharing, careful PR strategy, and definitely no public exposure of the ongoing investigation. Keep stakeholders calm. Manage the narrative. Protect the brand.
Instead, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij did something unprecedented: he opened a public Google Doc with live investigation notes, started a YouTube livestream of their engineering recovery efforts, and let thousands of people watch their disaster unfold in real-time with live chat enabled. The entire internet could see their engineers working through the crisis, their failed backup systems, and their desperate attempts to restore data.
This level of transparency was "unheard of until now." The industry watched in horror and fascination as GitLab essentially live-tweeted their own catastrophe. Traditional crisis management experts probably had panic attacks watching it happen.
The result? GitLab was "recently praised for its transparency" and received an outpouring of support through #HugOps on Twitter. Their radical irresponsibility with crisis management conventions actually increased customer trust and set a new standard for incident response. They turned a reputation-destroying disaster into a reputation-building moment of authentic leadership.
Focus is not responsible
The pattern shows up everywhere once you see it. When Netflix cannibalized their profitable DVD business to bet on streaming that barely worked. When Apple killed the iPod to build the iPhone. When Tesla pushed everyone to "production hell" to scale Model 3 manufacturing.
None of these moves were responsible to the process. All of them were responsible for the outcome.
My approach to joining startups violates every rule of responsible management. I'm making decisions without full context. I'm changing directions without comprehensive stakeholder alignment. I'm moving fast enough to break things and upset people.
But I'm taking responsibility for survival. And survival requires being unreasonable about speed.
When you're facing an existential deadline, managing everyone's comfort today means letting everyone down tomorrow. Gradual change feels responsible, but it's just slow death with better PR.
The math doesn't care about your process. The market doesn't care about your onboarding plan. Your runway doesn't care about your team's feelings.
The most successful companies aren't built by people who were responsible to everyone's expectations. They're built by people who took responsibility for transformation, even when it broke things.
Responsibility is for the mediocre. Results are for the rest of us.