The companies with the best culture aren’t necessarily the ones with the best values, even though those terms often get conflated. What looks like great culture in a startup is often just efficient coordination: fast decisions, clear ownership and minimal friction between people who need each other to get something done. The “soft” language of engagement and inspiration hides that culture is, at its core, an economic system.

Don’t get me wrong, culture is real. But wasting an employee’s time is a major source of low morale and disengagement, and slow coordination wastes time at scale. When founders raise funds from investors, they talk about customer acquisition cost, retention rates and burn rate — all the standard metrics. But they are not thinking about the cost to ship. That invisibility is expensive.

Coordination needs to be treated like any other capital cost, so here’s how to find where those costs hide in your organization, and how to redesign decision-making to eliminate the dependencies that are killing your speed.

The coordination tax

Every dependency between people or teams is overhead that costs time and money. When products needs design, design needs engineering and engineering needs legal approval before anything ships, you have created a chain where each link can break. The inefficiencies PwC calls the “sludge tax” include what I call the coordination tax.

Building my blockchain company taught me to think about dependencies as stacked bets, with each needing to work for the whole system to function. This concept highlights the fragility of large systems built on interconnected parts. My own early project demonstrated this when a foundational piece of our infrastructure failed, immediately wiping out the entire ecosystem we had labored to create.

That same logic applies inside any company. More approvals make your operation more fragile and McKinsey research shows faster decision-making and execution are correlated with higher returns. Coordination only feels safe because it spreads responsibility, yet if done poorly, it can slow execution and compound risk.

All else being equal, a single employee who can wear three hats is superior to three employees who wear one hat each, because you have eliminated the cost of coordination.

Decision architecture

Strategic decisions in startups shouldn’t be democratic exercises. Instead of building consensus, a founder’s job is to design the decision architecture, essentially bridging the gap between research and real-world applications:

1. Start with a decision map. For every recurring decision (like pricing, feature rollout, or hiring), list three roles: who decides, who advises and who executes. Bottlenecks form when these roles aren’t obvious. Stripe, for example, uses documented “Operating Principles” to guide decisions and minimize confusion. To prevent documentation bloat, the simplest solution might just be to have a single owner for all recurring expenses, maybe your Chief of Staff.
2. Shorten the feedback loop. The fastest teams create direct lines between the person doing the work and the person responsible for outcomes. Middle layers that exist only to “keep people informed” often slow things down without actually improving the quality of the decisions.
3. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Teach judgment by analyzing key calls after execution, not by crowdsourcing permission before acting.

Building these systems helps the company shift from a maze of dependencies to a network of clear commitments.

Common coordination traps

Startups rarely notice coordination costs until they compound. The signals are subtle, and they hide inside normal workflows that feel productive. Here are four of the most common traps.

1. Sequential ownership. Teams hand work off in tidy linear stages — design hands to product, product to engineering, engineering to QA. This sequence multiplies idle time and blame. You spot it when teams complain about waiting on others or when every sprint review sounds like a postmortem for the previous one. So, parallelize the work where possible, and make cross-functional ownership the norm instead of the exception.
2. Decision diffusion. Founders often over-rotate on transparency and invite too many people into decisions. Everyone gives input, so no one feels responsible for outcomes. Trim the invite list and assign a single decision-maker per issue. Great decisions are not formed under consensus. Sometimes, as the CEO, you might override the entire team.
3. Defensive documentation. Every new policy or approval form adds latency to protect against one past error. If your documentation reads like legal code or if no one can recall the last time a doc was deleted, you have created a bureaucracy. The solution is to limit controls to those that materially change outcomes. If someone keeps screwing up in new ways, the solution isn’t more documentation. That person might just not be a good fit for your team.
4. Asymmetric responsiveness. Certain functions, like design or data science, move at different tempos than sales or product. This misalignment can lead to coordination costs exploding through waiting and realignment. The idea is to synchronize around the slowest critical path or decouple the work entirely.

What to measure

Since coordination is a cost, you must measure it:

• Decision Latency: Track the time from idea to action, categorized by decision type.
• Escalations: Count how often decisions get kicked upstairs due to unclear authority.
• Dependency Chains: Map recent launches. List the teams involved, approvals required and note which steps prevented problems versus which added delay.

Approval processes that exist mainly to make people feel safe should go. Keep only those that prevent real failure.

What this looks like in practice

Companies with low coordination costs look like they have great culture because things move easily. Everyone knows what matters, decisions stic and teams avoid endless loops of alignment.

The goal is to spend coordination deliberately, like any other form of capital. When coordination flows where it compounds, culture becomes an operating system that pays dividends in speed, clarity resilience and its more traditional metric — employee engagement.