Does a startup with only three people need leadership?

What is early-stage entrepreneurial leadership?

Leadership, generally speaking, is the ability to listen to diverse opinions and make decisions that everyone can agree on. It's the ability to set clear goals, assign responsibilities, and lead an organization in a stable manner.

But the kind of leadership I'm talking about is somewhat different. It's the kind of leadership that makes people believe in and want to join in on even the most outrageous ideas. It's the kind of leadership that motivates people to find their own path and take action, even when their goals are unclear.

He's not a gentlemanly leader beloved by everyone, but rather a leader who inspires even just one person to join him in achieving his reckless dream. He's a leader who, at times, resembles Don Quixote, creating Sancho Panza, who believes in Don Quixote and runs alongside him.

Image: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

We metaphorically call this kind of leadership "religious leadership ." It's leadership that leads through faith, not through words. It's the power to move people's hearts, not their minds.

스타트업 리더십: 왜 종교지도자적 리더십이어야 하는가

Why is this kind of leadership necessary?

We invest in early-stage startups. And early-stage startups are always in a state of uncertainty. The product, the market, and the team's direction are constantly changing.

The market and solutions we initially believed in may not work in reality, and team members may even leave one by one during this process. Teams that seem too perfect from the start are more prone to crumbling under these uncertainties. This is because they were structured solely around solutions and markets, not people.

But the aforementioned "founder with leadership" is different. He keeps the team from collapsing even when the direction is wrong. This is because his fundamental convictions—"why we do this?" —hold people together and keep them grounded.

Experience at Toss

I've personally experienced this. We experienced several failures in the early days of our startup, alongside Toss CEO Seung-Geon Lee, but the reason the team was able to survive was because he was "that kind of" leader.

CEO Seung-Geon Lee (first from left) and co-founder Tae-Yang Lee (second from left) in 2014 (Source: Korea Economic Daily)

The journey of a startup is a constant cycle of upheaval. To endure even the most turbulent storms, a company must have strong roots, and those roots ultimately stem from "what we believe."

If you can make one person truly trust you, two can, and if two trust you, three are even easier. As that trust builds, it creates a scalable framework, which ultimately becomes a culture . The power to gather and sustain people, and the energy to move them forward together, comes from the depth of the leader's faith .

Toss's Growth Journey (Source: Viva Republica)

Of course, it's very difficult to accurately identify this type of leadership in the early stages. I've only experienced one instance, and that may have been just a stroke of luck.

Nevertheless, the reason I bring this up is because I wasn't "that leader," but rather the co-founder who first fell in love with that leader and ran alongside him. More than the specific form of that leadership, I experienced firsthand how someone who worked with such a leader could persevere to the end.

So I believe.

Leadership begins with the “ability to create people to work together.”
And it expands from constantly asking “why are they with me?”

We invest in early-stage startups. In this journey, where markets and products constantly change, it's ultimately people who survive, and at the heart of this is leadership that inspires belief in the vision.

We are investors who discover the seeds of such leadership and grow together with them.

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