Bromances in Companies

“In other companies that I’ve built or seen, there’s the opposite. People are extremely well-liked across the teams — people loved each other as human beings — but they doubted the other person’s competence. … Anytime I’ve seen teams with these amazing love affairs, the cofounders cannot be separated, they’re brothers and sisters together, you always want to probe: Do you really respect each other, or do you just really like each other? If your level of expertise isn’t there and you’re kind of making up for that by having a great relationship, it will not survive a single tough moment. In the middle of when everything is on the line — and we’ll go back to loving each other, but right now, I just want you to not do your engineering job because you’re not even that good of an engineer, even though you’re the CTO — that’s the end of the company. That will not survive.”

— Max Levchin