The AI Hiring Race Is Measuring the Wrong Thing
- Farzad Khosravi
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
After coaching 500 founders, one question tells me who's going to make it, I can usually spot it within about ten minutes of meeting a founder now.
They're a couple years in. Growth has stalled. When I ask what's going on, the reasons come fast, and every one of them points outward: the market moved, the last two hires didn't pan out, sales can't close, the investors don't get it. Some of that might even be true. But watch where none of it lands. On the person doing the talking.
I've coached more than 500 founders over the past ten years. Good founders, mostly. Smart people with real products and paying customers.
The difference between the founders who eventually break through and the ones who stay stuck for years has very little to do with intelligence or work ethic.
It comes down to something much simpler - and much harder:
Can they honestly ask themselves one uncomfortable question? Am I the problem?
Most can't. There's actually a good reason for that, and it goes back a few hundred thousand years.
Why Founders Blame Everything but Themselves
We evolved in small tribes where getting kicked out of the group could mean death. So whenever our status feels threatened, the brain has a built-in reflex: point somewhere else. The market. A bad hire. Whatever's within reach. Anything but "I got this one wrong."
I call it the Ape Brain, and it runs the same play in startups that it did on the savanna. Sales dip, and your brain immediately hands you a clean explanation about the team or the timing. It feels like clarity. Most of the time, it's fear.
Psychologists have a name for the sharp edge of this: projection. The leader who's quietly questioning themselves starts calling everyone else lazy, disengaged, or not senior enough - without realizing they're describing their own insecurity. The dangerous part is that those labels don't stay in your head.
There's a famous study from the 1960s where teachers were told, completely at random, that certain students were about to bloom academically. Those students ended up outperforming their classmates for no reason other than the adults around them expected them to.
The opposite works just as well.
Treat your team like they're mediocre long enough - in a hundred tiny ways you'll never notice - and eventually they'll become exactly what you expected.
What it Actually Costs You
Ignore the question long enough, and eventually you build a company where people quietly stop telling you the truth.
Enron is the version they teach in business school.
During a 2001 earnings call, an analyst asked the CEO for a straightforward explanation of the company's balance sheet. Instead of answering, the CEO called him an obscenity on a live earnings call.
Every employee heard the same message: questions are dangerous here.
Six months later, the company collapsed. Seventy-four billion dollars disappeared. Thousands of people lost their jobs. Retirement accounts were wiped out. Not because nobody knew something was wrong, but because nobody felt safe enough to say it while there was still time to fix it.
You're probably not building the next Enron, but you can absolutely build a smaller version of that culture without ever intending to, one flinch at a time.
Every time you make it just a little more expensive for someone to bring you bad news.
Think Like a Scientist
The solution isn't beating yourself up, you can relax on that. The solution is changing your relationship with your own ideas.
Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist, says leaders tend to fall into one of four modes:
Preachers defend what they already believe
Prosecutors look for flaws in everyone else's thinking
Politicians want people to like them
Scientists do something different
They treat their own beliefs like hypotheses that deserve to be tested, they're actively looking for evidence they're wrong and they keep their ego in one hand and their ideas in the other, far enough apart that abandoning a bad idea doesn't feel like abandoning themselves.
Three ways to practice it this week:
Ask yourself: If a sharper founder took my seat tomorrow, what's the first thing they'd change? That's probably your highest-priority to-do list. Deep down, you already know the answer.
Measure how long bad news takes to reach you. If your team sits on problems for two weeks before you hear about them, that's probably not a team problem.
Before your next big decision, spend time with the strongest argument against it. Sit with it long enough to understand why a smart, reasonable person would disagree with you.
One Founder Who Actually Did This
I coached Todd Sullivan, a YC 2012 founder running a corporate travel company. COVID nearly finished him off. Churn was climbing, the usual quick fixes did nothing, and he could have written the whole thing off as the pandemic. Plenty of founders did exactly that.
Instead, he questioned the assumptions he'd stopped examining years earlier.
Who actually needs this product?
Why do they buy?
What have we simply accepted as true?
It was slow and it wasn't much fun, but over the next fourteen months the company went from $9M to $25M in revenue and from almost no enterprise pipeline to more than a hundred leads, on one new hire and no extra marketing budget.
He got those numbers by questioning his own calls before he blamed anything outside the building.
That's why I keep dragging founders back to "am I the problem."
Blame the market and you're stuck waiting on the market. Same with a bad hire, or a soft quarter. Put yourself somewhere in the problem and at least you're holding something you can move. Most people go quiet for a second when I ask it. Ask it anyway, before the next pivot or the next round of layoffs. Then go do something about what you hear.
About the author: Farzad Khosravi is a 3x founder, ICF-trained executive coach, and the fractional COO who helped a YC S25 startup raise $8.5M. He's coached 500+ founders on validation, fundraising, and building companies that last, and he's the author of The Primal Trap. He runs No BS Startup Coach in NYC. More at nobsstartupcoach.com.
