The Late Joiner Fallacy

One of the most misunderstood aspects of building a startup is how the team evolves over time—particularly the quality of talent you can attract as you grow. When you're just starting out, building the company is a messy, chaotic process. You're scraping together talent, convincing early believers to take a chance on something that might not even exist in a year.

In the early days at Loop we worked out of a two-bedroom flat. We put desks in the living room and converted one of the bedrooms into a conference room (the other bedroom is where our co-founder Ryan slept).

When people would come to interview for a job there would be nowhere to sit, so we’d kindly ask them to wait on the balcony. It felt like an office in the way a doghouse feels like a house. Which meant we could only hire two types of people: Those irrational enough to join, and those without other options.

As our startup grew, and particularly after we announced funding rounds, we started to attract better talent. We set up a proper office, started to build a brand, and suddenly people who would have never considered our outfit wanted in.

And that’s when I began to notice an interesting cultural dynamic—one I call the "Late Joiner Fallacy."

It goes something like this: People who join later, when a company is more established, look around and see some of the work that was done before them and judge it, often harshly. They see messy processes, half-baked solutions, or decisions that seem ill-considered. And they begin to question the people who made those decisions in the early days. "How did these people end up here?" they think. "Why are they still around? Surely, I could do better."

What they fail to recognize is the vast difference in the nature of the challenges faced early on versus those encountered later. The late joiners never lived in the doghouse.

In the early days, the ambiguity was thick. We had no map, just a compass and faith. Early employees weren’t just working with fewer resources—they were operating in an environment of extreme uncertainty. What looks like poor decision-making in hindsight often made perfect sense in the chaotic context of those early moments.

To judge early work through the lens of later clarity is a mistake. It’s like criticizing a builder for not laying down marble floors in a house when they were still struggling to put up walls with salvaged materials. The early team isn’t there because they were the "best in the business”, but because they were willing to take on a staggering amount of risk and uncertainty—long before anyone knew whether the company would even survive.

Late joiners also find it hard to swallow the fact that some early employees typically have more equity than they do. From their vantage point, these early employees may not seem as competent or skilled as the talent the company is now attracting. They may grumble about the "unfairness" of this dynamic.

But here’s the thing: equity isn’t just a reward for competence. It’s a reward for timing. It’s compensation for stepping into the unknown when failure was not only an option, but likely. Early employees gave up higher-paying jobs, worked longer hours, and stuck with you when the odds were against you. Their equity reflects that risk, not just their contribution.

Late joiners, by contrast, come in when the startup has more stability. They join when the risk is much lower. Naturally, so is the reward. You don’t get to ask for big upside without facing the big downside.

What’s interesting is that early employees and late joiners both play critical roles in the success of a company. The early employees build the foundation, sometimes clumsily but bravely. The late joiners help the company scale, often with more refined skills, but with the benefit of an existing foundation. The true magic happens when both groups recognize this dynamic for what it is—a necessary, symbiotic partnership.

The late joiner fallacy happens when late employees mistake their more refined contributions as inherently more valuable, overlooking the sheer difficulty of doing anything at all in the wild, early stages of a company’s life. In a startup, success is not just about competence. It’s about timing, resilience, and an appetite for ambiguity. Everyone contributes—just in different ways and at different times.