I agree in part. The real trick of it here is that those former employees will also be wearing their own lenses of bias. There's a good chance they don't have full information on the company.
Then the challenge becomes a game of synthesizing contradicting perspectives. That's what makes this exercise of distilling causes into "bitesized pieces" so difficult.
There is a lot that goes into running companies that ordinary employees take for granted. I don't think there's any reason the perspective of the average employee will be more accurate than the perspective of the average founder. Both will have strong biases coloring the perception of events in their own favor, and in some cases, problem employees and problem founders may blame each other instead of admitting their own faults.
In most cases, there is, of course, no simple way to pinpoint a particular place where everything ran amok. That's to be expected. The analyst needs to listen to everyone with credible knowledge of the company and use their own judgment to come to an opinion on the biggest issue. This is a subjective analysis, and not something that can be authoritatively established.
This is absolutely true, and I'll take it even a step further: great people can still form dysfunctional teams even if they all do good individual work.
Often times in an early stage startup the problem is the team doesn't gel enough to adequately explore the problem space. In those cases, the founder might conclude that the opportunity wasn't there, but maybe it's because people weren't aligned enough to push far enough in the right direction. It's impossible to know whether there was really a viable business there, or whether it was a failure of the team. But subjectively after going through several startups and other early stage projects, I know the feeling of a team that is gelling, and it can make an unquantifiably huge difference to early results.
> "Both will have strong biases coloring the perception of events in their own favor, and in some cases, problem employees and problem founders may blame each other instead of admitting their own faults."
This really resonated with me. It's truly a skill to build the self-awareness to realize when you're the problem. It's much easier to externalize or abstract the problems away, particularly in stressful times where everyone feels overworked. I've caught myself doing this.
I have to set aside part of every week to step back, breathe in, and candidly examine how I might be contributing to problems that are happening. Otherwise it's too easy to get wrapped up in the hunt for demons outside the burning house.
That's true, but ordinary employees will have a perspective that founders usually just can't see, usually due to their biases. As such, it'd be better to take in the perspectives of both, to paint a more complete picture.
Then the challenge becomes a game of synthesizing contradicting perspectives. That's what makes this exercise of distilling causes into "bitesized pieces" so difficult.