Hiring managers from a bigger org into a startup is the easiest trap I've seen companies fall into. And the more experienced the manager and the more successful the big-co, the worse it gets - but also, the more seductive it gets especially if the founder feels like they personally are a bit out of their own engineering management depth.

Everything needed to keep a giant super-successful post-product-market-fit company running smoothly and reliably as, say, a VP at Google, is completely the opposite of what you need to move fast when you're trying to figure out how to thrive (or even just survive).

I haven't worked in one of those "this is like a startup inside a big-co" places that you often hear about, but I imagine it's why those struggle to compete with actual startups. It's hard to act like you are facing existential risk when you just plain aren't.