Startup Leadership: Why It Must Be Religious Leadership

Category

Opinions on the bass

Written by

Karl Shin (CEO)

Date

Aug 19, 2025

Working as a VC, seeing the companies I invested in grow and expand their organizations has been incredibly rewarding, at least for me. Growth inevitably broadens the scope of my work, and it's also a process of increasing the number of people who believe in the company's growth and join in.

However, at the same time , I've also witnessed a phenomenon where performance and productivity are increasingly limited compared to the ever-increasing workforce . Simply put, I haven't seen many instances where 20 people can more than double the value of the work done by 10 people (this was particularly evident during the startup investment boom of 2019-2021).

As a company grows, it needs a BD to launch new businesses, a PO to lead products, and someone to take care of internal affairs. Each of these people is selected based on need, so it's only natural that they should perform their functions and the overall utility should increase exponentially. Why is it so difficult to achieve this?

(Diminishing marginal utility curve across organizational scale)

Before answering that question, let's address a more fundamental question: why do we gather together to work? While it seems almost instinctive for companies to hire people and work together, the inefficiencies of bringing so many people together to work are actually more numerous than you might think. The increase in the number of people within an organization inevitably leads to various problems, including communication issues, increased difficulty in aligning interests, and the issue of hiring the right people.

Simply put, just because a business organization needs a function performed by humans doesn't mean it can simply hire human hands. Because humans themselves are inevitably involved, countless inefficiencies arise. (That's not my own words; it's Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company.)

Back to the question, the reason we come together and work is to create exponential results as a team. Even if a single individual strives to maximize their existing performance, if they can achieve the same level of performance as 1.5 to 2 people, a team can achieve 10 times, or even 100 times that. I believe this is why we create and work within the "organization" known as a company. It's especially essential for startups, which must achieve maximum results with a small team.

In fact, the 10-to-20-person organization discussed earlier shouldn't double its performance. Even if the number of employees doubles, the team must generate exponential results by generating 10- or 100-fold performance. Otherwise, there's no point in working together.

The 'religion' that the organization believes in

Saying that working together is inefficient, yet then insisting that collective work should produce exponential results, sounds contradictory at first. However, there's a clear way to break through this paradox: "believing in the same thing." In other words, it involves establishing a religion or doctrine that all members of the organization share . While we might call this a mission or vision, I'll use the term "religion" (though this might be misleading).

If the questions of why we exist, what is most important to us, and what our goals are— are firmly ingrained in the members of an organization, a clue emerges to resolving inefficiencies in working together. This is because these shared beliefs clarify the "standards." Once I become clear about the goals and values of my current work, the "standards" for my work become clear, and many problems are solved.

When I first met Taeyang, co-founder of Toss, who works with me at my company, he told me a story. He said that Toss's in-house baristas consider every second it takes to make a cup of coffee. It wasn't simply about reducing time; reducing time allowed employees to perform better, which in turn accelerated the company's pursuit of a brighter future. (When NASA was booming, if you asked the janitors what they did, they'd say they were helping to send humans to the moon, right?) It's as if such thoughts and beliefs extend beyond the brain to the very nerve endings, and holding ourselves to a clear, high standard of work. I believe that's what it means to work together and create Exponential.

( 1. Toss' organizational culture / 2. Valve's handbook / 3. Netflix's 'no rules' / 4. Baemin's work rules )

Startup Religion: Who Creates It and How?

Two questions follow. If establishing a religion and believing in it together is so important, who will establish it and how will it be spread? The answer to the first question is quite simple. Naturally, it's the founder/CEO . This is both the founder's duty and his/her privilege. In other words, it's something no one else can do for him/her. A company can only begin with the founder. A company is founded to embody the values, aspirations, and desires he/she possesses. Can anyone else ask the question, "What do I want?" At the very least, the starting point of this "doctrine" can only be the founder.

The second question is how to spread it—that is, how to believe it so strongly together. This, too, is where the founder, at least for relatively small startups, begins. They must go beyond simply crafting a compelling doctrine and verbally stating it. They must demonstrate their own faith and practice in their every action. However, this isn't solely the founder's responsibility, and the methods can be varied, making it worthy of a separate topic.

However, there are a few things we must avoid misunderstanding. First, these religions and doctrines aren't necessarily propaganda shouted from a podium. And they may not necessarily be socially acceptable values. For example, "We will make money by generating sales and profits faster and more explosively than anyone else" could be our religion, or "We will work six hours a day, four days a week, and maintain the company's sustainability."

It's not a question of right or wrong, but rather a question of what we truly believe together. The real problem isn't the consistency of a religion, but rather the lack of awareness or absence of what we believe together, or the discrepancy between what we say we believe and what we actually do.

The title suggests it's about leadership, but the word "leadership" isn't used even once. There are so many things in the world that are considered leadership and related to it. It's not a question of right or wrong. Each approach has its own way of doing things.

However, the leadership style I believe startup founders need is "religious leadership ." Establishing a shared creed and leading team members to believe in it. This, in turn, overcomes the inefficiencies of working together and creates explosive, exponential results. This is a founder's ability that early-stage VCs, seeking a 100x return, find difficult to abandon.

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