Overhiring Is the Biggest Killer

How do funded startups end up default dead? Overwhelmingly by hiring too fast. PG calls hiring too fast by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money.

The reasoning error is causal: founders see that successful companies have lots of employees and treat headcount as an engine of success rather than a result of it. So they hire to look and feel like a winner, and burn explodes while growth doesn't.

The usual death spiral: a product with moderate appeal gets moderate initial growth, the founders raise on that story, then hire aggressively to force growth up. But the product's appeal was the constraint, not the headcount. Growth never comes, and now the runway is vanishing at triple speed. The fix was never more people. It was making the product something users actually want.