timeless PinkLetters, translated from our Spanish Substack for English-speaking readers.
The Uncomfortable Side of Leadership
When people fantasize about becoming founders, they never picture themselves firing half of their team. We all want to be the visionaries who find a gap in the market, close an impossible deal, or build a breakthrough technology.
But the truth is that to build something meaningful, the hard decisions —the ones that hurt— are inevitable. Only those willing to face them with clarity and firmness can hold the course when everything feels uncertain.
Leadership in startups isn’t just about inspiration, vision, or culture. It also has an uncomfortable, almost painful side: making decisions that directly affect the people who trusted us.
Letting someone go. Shutting down a product the team once believed in. Saying no to a tempting client or an insistent investor. These are not the moments that look good on LinkedIn, but they are the ones that define the real direction of a startup.
Time Moves Differently in a Startup
Part of what makes leadership in startups so hard is that time doesn’t move at the same speed as in other organizations.
More than once I’ve caught myself thinking, “It can’t be, we talked about this ages ago”, only to realize it happened three days earlier.
Six months of shared work can feel like two years. Someone who joined two years ago can seem like they’ve been around forever. The intensity compresses everything, making each leadership dilemma feel more urgent, more dramatic, more final.
In a way, like people say that every dog year equals seven human years, I’d say that startup time runs at least four times faster. That compression turns every uncomfortable decision into something that can’t be postponed without consequences.
Impatience or Accelerated Time?
In startups, postponing a tough decision can feel like we’re not deciding at all —as if letting things run their course were a neutral way of waiting to see what happens.
But doing nothing is also a decision. It means choosing the status quo, even when we know it’s leading somewhere we didn’t consciously intend to go.
What’s most dangerous is that we often hide behind inaction to avoid the discomfort of acting.We tell ourselves we need more information, that the person might improve, that the market might shift. But each day we don’t act, we validate the same trajectory we were trying to change.
In a context where time moves four times faster, choosing not to decide is simply accelerating the decay. The startup keeps running —just in the wrong direction.
Closing
To lead is sometimes to pause, decide, and accept the consequences.In a startup, every choice carries weight. But so does inaction.
Leadership isn’t about avoiding the pain of decision-making; it’s about accepting that deciding almost always means choosing which cost you’re willing to pay.