LIINA LAAS: If your idea of ‘the best people’ all look the same, you’re probably building blind
Why do we keep ignoring the facts?
There is a very predictable ritual in startup culture. Every few months, someone runs a piece about all-male founding teams, or the microscopic percentage of funding going to women, or the strange persistence of 996 as if exhaustion itself were a moat. Then a particular corner of the internet reacts as though someone has proposed banning ambition.
The most common response is also the most convenient one.
At this stage, you just need to hire the best people. It’s too early to think about diversity.
I have heard some version of that sentence for years, and every time I hear it, I wonder how so many otherwise intelligent people can say it with a straight face.
Of course you should hire the best people. Who exactly is arguing for hiring the mediocre? But that line often disguises something much less noble than meritocracy. It usually means: hire the people who feel familiar to you. That may feel efficient. It may even feel rational. But it is not the same thing as “best.”
And more importantly, it is not the same thing as building a good company.
I’ve spent years trying to understand what the diversity problem in tech actually is. Why do so few women or people from other minority groups become venture-backed founders? Why do so many early teams still look like clones of each other, and why do we keep acting as if that is not only normal, but somehow optimal?
The numbers are well known by now, and they remain embarrassing. Diverse founding teams still receive a tiny fraction of venture funding, despite repeated evidence that they can outperform on capital efficiency and revenue generation. The gap is not due to lack of capability. It is due to what we repeatedly decide to notice, trust, and reward.
That last part matters more than people admit. Because what gets framed as “the best person” is rarely an objective conclusion. It is often a social one.
No diversity strategy needed
When I started building my own team, I found myself thinking about all of this whilst we had to move super fast.
We did not sit down with a performative diversity strategy. There was no quota chart. No grand announcement about building the future of inclusive work. We hired using a far more scientific method: vibe check, actual skills, grit, and work ethic - the best candidate for the role. That’s it.
And somehow, by complete miracle, or perhaps by simply not being weirdly narrow in our definition of talent, we ended up with a team that is genuinely quite diverse. Different personalities, ages, cultures, work histories, ways of approaching problems. Some are parents. Some have cats. Some come from very different technical or commercial contexts. Some see structure first, others see possibilities, some want to mitigate disaster, which is also a useful trait in moderation.
What we have already seen from this is not a moral lesson. It is not an ESG talking point. It is not a nice story to tell at a panel discussion while everyone nods politely.
It is simply useful.
We are shipping fast. Solutions are coming from all angles. People catch what others miss. The conversations are richer because they are not all running on the same assumptions. There is less blind agreement and more constructive tension. It is for sure more productive than building an echo chamber and calling it alignment.
That word alignment gets abused a lot in startup land. Alignment is not the same as sameness. Sameness is easy, it feels smooth. Sameness also means everyone is likely to miss the same thing at the same time.
What makes this especially frustrating is that the evidence for the value of diversity is not exactly obscure. We are not dealing with some fringe theory cooked up by people who dislike code and protein shakes. There is a long body of research showing that teams with greater diversity, whether in background, cognitive style, experience, or leadership composition tend to perform better on complex problem-solving and, in many cases, financially as well.
McKinsey has been publishing on the link between diversity and business performance for years. BCG has found that women-founded startups can generate significantly more revenue per dollar invested. First Round reported that companies with at least one female founder in their portfolio outperformed all-male teams by a wide margin. Even if one wants to be skeptical of any single report, the broader pattern is hard to ignore unless one is deeply committed to not noticing things.
And yet, many people do exactly that.
The resistance
What fascinates me about the resistance is that it reminds me of something I’ve been reading recently: Meet the Neighbors by Brandon Keim. It is a book about animal minds and about the long, strange history of humans refusing to accept that other animals might have inner lives, feelings, intelligence, and forms of consciousness.
For centuries, a huge part of science was spent trying to prove that animals were basically objects. Descartes famously described them as automata: complex machines without real thought or feeling. This idea lingered in different forms for an absurdly long time, even when observation repeatedly suggested otherwise.
Animals solved problems, remembered things, formed bonds, grieved losses, played games, navigated social hierarchies, adapted, improvised, and showed signs of awareness that were impossible to dismiss if you actually looked. But rather than update the worldview, the worldview kept trying to force the evidence back into the old frame.
That, to me, is one of the most revealing things about human systems: we are astonishingly good at preserving a belief long after reality has started mocking it.
When the evidence didn’t fit, people did not always conclude that the theory was wrong. They often concluded that the evidence had been misunderstood.
There is something uncomfortably familiar in that.
The startup world often behaves in much the same way. We say we want the best people. We say we care about outcomes. We say we are rational and data-driven and obsessed with performance. Then we keep rewarding the same narrow founder profile, keep building the same kinds of early teams, keep acting surprised that talent from outside that mold is “hard to find,” and keep defending a culture that often excludes exactly the people who would make the system stronger.
It is not that the evidence is absent. It is that the frame is stubborn.
And once you notice that, the 996 conversation starts to look similarly absurd.
Expensive chaos
I believe in urgency and startup speed. I believe there are seasons where everyone stretches because the opportunity is real and the timing matters. I have no romantic attachment to a soft, slow, “let’s all close the laptop at four and water the herbs” version of startup life. Sometimes you do have to push. Sometimes the week is intense. The launch does not care that you wanted a balanced Thursday.
But there is a difference between intensity and ideology.
The cult of 996 treats exhaustion as a proxy for commitment. It assumes that if you are not visibly overworked, you must not be serious enough. This is one of those ideas that sounds hardcore and disciplined until you actually build things for long enough to realise how expensive fatigue becomes.
Tired people make mistakes. Not interesting, innovative mistakes. Not brave, ambitious mistakes. Usually boring, avoidable mistakes. They forget something obvious. They misread a requirement. They ship something fragile. They miss a signal in a customer conversation. They make a call they would not have made with a clear head. And then everyone spends three times as long fixing what should not have broken in the first place. That is not high performance, that is just expensive chaos with better branding.
This is also where diversity and work culture are not separate conversations at all. A culture built around constant overextension naturally filters for a very specific kind of person: usually someone with fewer outside obligations, more structural support, and a life stage that allows work to consume everything else. That does not make them better. It makes them more compatible with one narrow model of work.
If your company can only function for people whose life outside work can be suspended indefinitely, then your culture is not rigorous. It is brittle.
Leaking talent
Even if you ignore all of the moral or social arguments, it becomes a practical hiring problem very quickly. Founders often underestimate how visible an early team becomes. If everyone in the company looks the same, talks the same, and seems to come from the same lane, strong candidates notice. I have seen it happen in previous companies: qualified people come in, take one look around, and quietly conclude that this place was not built with them in mind. They do not storm out. They do not make speeches. They just leave.
That is not because they are delicate. It is because they can read a room.
The irony, of course, is that many founders who claim they are “just hiring the best” are unknowingly constraining themselves through their own networks. If it is narrow, your candidate pool will be narrow. If your warm intros all come from the same demographic and professional bubble, your team will eventually reflect it and you will convince yourself that the market simply contains no one else. It does. You just never built the bridges.
This is one of the reasons founders need to be more honest about what culture signals from a distance. What do your values look like to someone who doesn’t know you? What kind of people do you celebrate? Who gets airtime? What does your team photo communicate before anyone has spoken to you?
If the answer is “a very specific type of person keeps being rewarded here,” then you should not be surprised when the talent pool self-selects accordingly.
I saw the opposite of this at scale during my time at Deel. That company was not a theory. It was thousands of people from over a hundred countries, all bringing different assumptions, contexts, and ways of working into the same machine. Was it always simple? Of course not. Diverse teams are not easier. They are better. They force more explicit communication. They surface edge cases. They challenge lazy assumptions. They make you explain what you mean instead of nodding along because everyone already thinks the same way.
And in a company trying to do something genuinely difficult, that is invaluable.
This is also why I find the framing of diversity as somehow opposed to excellence so maddening. It suggests a false choice that simply does not exist. I did not hire people because of their gender, ethnicity, or life story. I hired the best people I could find. Somehow, rather shockingly, the best people were not all identical.
That should not be a radical statement. It should be obvious. But startup culture has spent so long overfitting to a single founder and team archetype that it now treats any deviation from that pattern as suspicious, political, or somehow unserious.
And no, before anyone starts frothing at the mouth, this is not an anti-white-man manifesto. I gave birth to a white man. One, unsurprisingly, is my father. I also live with one. All excellent men. The point is not that white men are the problem. The point is that they are not the only solution.
At some point, the conversation needs to mature beyond outrage and slogans. Diversity is not a luxury for later. It is not a checkbox. It is not a PR exercise. It is one of the most practical advantages an early-stage team can have when trying to build something ambitious, resilient, and original.
Imagine what could happen if startups are built by people who share values but not necessarily backgrounds. People who challenge each other without pulling in different directions. People who bring different lenses to the same mission. People who can move fast without making tired, stupid mistakes because they have mistaken self-neglect for excellence.
If that sounds less glamorous than the mythology of the all-night founder sprint, so be it. I am not trying to build a mythology. I am trying to build a company.
And from what I’ve seen so far, the fastest way to build blind is still to fill the room with people who all see the world exactly the same way.