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Key Takeaways Culture isn’t values on a wall; it’s how efficiently your company coordinates work.
Every approval and dependency is a tax that quietly compounds execution risk.
The companies with the best culture aren’t necessarily the ones with the best values, even though those terms often get conflated. What looks like great culture in a startup is often just efficient coordination: fast decisions, clear ownership and minimal friction between people who need each other to get something done. The “soft” language of engagement and inspiration hides that culture is, at its core, an economic system.
Don’t get me wrong, culture is real. But wasting an employee’s time is a major source of low morale and disengagement, and slow coordination wastes time at scale. When founders raise funds from investors, they talk about customer acquisition cost, retention rates and burn rate — all the standard metrics. But they are not thinking about the cost to ship. That invisibility is expensive.
Coordination needs to be treated like any other capital cost, so here’s how to find where those costs hide in your organization, and how to redesign decision-making to eliminate the dependencies that are killing your speed.
The coordination tax
Every dependency between people or teams is overhead that costs time and money. When products needs design, design needs engineering and engineering needs legal approval before anything ships, you have created a chain where each link can break. The inefficiencies PwC calls the “sludge tax” include what I call the coordination tax.
Building my blockchain company taught me to think about dependencies as stacked bets, with each needing to work for the whole system to function. This concept highlights the fragility of large systems built on interconnected parts. My own early project demonstrated this when a foundational piece of our infrastructure failed, immediately wiping out the entire ecosystem we had labored to create.
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