Money isn't buying love.

You can hire a prostitute, she will work for you, but she will still not love you.

This is the same with companies.

I wasn't expecting them to do something bad for themselves, merely to simply do what I was explicitly asking and paying them for (and we paid above-market salaries). Too often communication was conveniently misinterpreted in obvious bad faith to justify them using some expensive AWS feature, or simply ignore the core message in the request. This was hidden for a lot longer than it should have been since Covid forced us to go remote all of a sudden and people would vouch for one another.

Honestly, I think now that there simply isn't a way to align most employees with you, and that the secret to successful start-ups is only going for the easy to execute things, that don't rely on the qualities of your employees (or you have 100mil raised and your problem is naturally a good challenge for them).

Just gotta keep it up as you scale. At around 200-300 employees your job in leadership is simply telling the same story over and over again to different constituencies in different ways, for years.

That's how you obtain incentive alignment, when you genuinely believe that working hard as possible for the company is in pursuit of something greater.

This is impossible to do for yet another tax/hr/finance/billing startup, and why companies with big missions like SpaceX et al have no problem hiring.

There's always something better I could have done as the person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have been recovered though.

Putting my faith in employees, expecting them to do maybe 80-90% of what I was doing as an employee 10 years earlier created an almost unrecoverable situation, that burned the entire runway to unscramble. Yet if I say that my biggest lesson was never to put trust in employees, as it's most likely impossible to create a good incentive system for them, most people won't believe me, as I'm sure you won't either.

I've come to think that the burden is no longer on anyone to create incentive systems, it's on society to reintroduce some morality. Only a limited amount of businesses have the luxury of aligned incentives.

But then there are generals who lead soldiers to die so that a war is won. So at least there exists another mode of leadership not covered by your statement.