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Why your star hires collapse first.
Kaeya Majmundar
November 17, 2025
TL;DR
Over the first three years of building my company, I made the same early-stage mistake most founders make: hiring for experience and/or skill instead of what I now call altitude.
It was the single most expensive lesson of our journey.
So I built a corrective system.
It’s called the “altitude framework” (below).
We’ve been running it for six months, and the operational outcomes changed dramatically.
This is the playbook I wish I had on Day 1.
The altitude framework outlines the five operating levels we use to understand how individuals function in a fast-moving, zero-to-one company.
Each level reflects distinct behaviors that reveal a person’s strengths and limitations, regardless of their formal role.
The goal:
Place people in roles where they can succeed, and set expectations that match their operating altitude.
❓Why this framework exists
I spent years and way too much investor capital learning the hard way that traditional hiring frameworks simply do not work in early-stage startups.
Zero-to-one companies all operate the same way:
extreme ambiguity
fluid priorities
high stakes and external visibility
incomplete information
high-speed iteration
no time for hand-holding
real reputational risk
This reality demands a different lens:
Not: “What is this person’s experience?”
Not: “Can they perform a specific task?”
But: “What altitude can this person operate at when the ground keeps moving?”
Fun fact:
Some of the most experienced, accomplished, impressive people you’ll ever meet will collapse into L1 behavior the moment ambiguity, pressure, or emotional volatility enters the picture.
It’s shocking the first time you see it but also completely predictable.
Emotions override competence fast.
Altitude is not a resume line; it’s a stress response.
If you don’t hire by altitude in an early-stage startup,
you will hire the wrong people, in the wrong roles, at the wrong time,
and you will pay for it with speed, sanity, and survival.
💪 How to Use This Framework
Thanks to GPT, my #1 recommendation is DON’T hire until you are 100% certain about 5 things:
North Star
How You Do It
Why You Do It
#1 Analogy
#1 Success Metric
I wouldn’t even bring on a co-founder until I was crystal clear on these.
For example, here’s ours @ Disclosure Facts:
North Star
Restore clarity in creator advertising.
How
We standardize, verify, and universally surface creator ad disclosures.
Why
So consumers have clarity regardless of the creative itself.
#1 Analogy
Nutrition Facts — we don’t judge the food; we standardize + fact check the info.
#1 Success Metric
# of disclosure labels surfaced to consumers.
Once you have conviction on these 5 things, then you can hire and this framework makes it possible to hire correctly.
Why keep it to just one founder + GPT until these boxes are checked? Because until you have conviction on them, your startup will stall out no matter how much time and capital you have.
Your willingness to sign your name in blood with 100% conviction on these five points gives you the internal clarity to continue at all because they answer the only questions that matter before you decide to commit to building a company:
why you
why now
why this
If you lose conviction in these points, you are too prone to regressing in altitude. The opportunity cost of running a startup below L3 level is excruciatingly costly especially in the age of AI.
✅ The Altitude Framework Principles
Index on L3s for founding team roles.
Put every new hire on a 30-60-90 day “altitude evaluation” plan.
If L3 behaviors aren’t visible by Day 90, part ways regardless of technical skills.Add L4s as the system layer only after multiple L3s exist.
Bring in L2s once processes stabilize and repeatability exists.
Only recruit L1s when time > money and they clearly show L2 potential.
Cut ties by Day 60 if L2 traits do not emerge.
The Altitude Framework Levels
Level | Technology Relationship Analogy | What This Signals | Core Weaknesses + “Tells” | Where They Fit |
L1 | This is the person who gets visibly anxious around any new gadget. If one button changes or one prompt pops up, they freeze and call for help. | - Needs handholding | - Destabilized by ambiguity, tenses up, asks for help asap | - Coordinated, well-defined roles |
L2 | This person can absolutely use tech but only after someone else did all the setup. They’re great once: - the WiFi is named - the passwords are saved - the apps are installed - the settings are pre-configured They’ll customize small things (wallpaper, fonts), but if the system glitches or the UI updates, they immediately ask: “Can you just fix this for me? | - Self sufficient within defined lanes | - Struggles when the playbook disappears, tries to figure it out but still defaults to asking for help | - Mature functions with established processes |
L3 | This is the person everyone goes to when something breaks. They unbox new devices confidently, skip the manual, set things up from scratch, figure out integrations, and troubleshoot without stress. A glitch? They fix it before others notice. They’re not “IT people” professionally. They’re just naturally high-altitude operators. | - Fully self-directed; can produce documentation that others use | - Asks for help only after exhausting their own problem-solving paths | - Founding roles |
L4 | This is the person who decides what tech the household should run on — not just how to use it. They: - select the WiFi mesh system - create the naming conventions - set up shared calendars - build the home automations - label everything - choose the right ecosystem (Apple? Google? Mixed?) - onboard new housemates - maintain the network - prevent conflicts (“Don’t download random apps on the shared iPad”) They don’t just use tech. They build the household tech environment. | - Naturally builds repeatable systems and frameworks + operates inside them | - Can become a bottleneck if they over-function | - Director-level roles |
L5 | This is the person who designs the entire philosophy of the home’s technology ecosystem. They think in terms of: - security - long-term consistency - future-proofing - privacy - compliance - reliability - integration across devices - minimizing failure points They aren’t setting up individual devices anymore. They are deciding: Should we move to a fully Apple ecosystem? Do we need a NAS or cloud storage? What privacy rules should we follow? How do we structure access for guests, kids, or parents? They’re operating at architecture altitude, not gadget altitude. | - Vision-setting and long term strategic clarity | - Moves faster than early employees can absorb | Founders, C-suite, VP-level leaders |
Note:
Some people are highly competent with workplace ambiguity but avoidant with household tech and vice versa. Don’t confuse the analogy with the actual assessment.
The point isn’t what someone does at home.
It’s whether their behavior under ambiguity resembles the patterns in these levels.
A person can be:
L3 in a structured ops environment
L2 in an ambiguous internal environment
L1 in a GC-facing conceptual narrative environment
In our company, a person can show L1/L2 altitude in Disclosure Facts’ domain,
but could show L3 communication altitude in a reflective personal domain.
That person can quit our company, join another one, and perform at L3+ for the exact same role they came to perform in our company but failed.
All of these can coexist.
Altitude ≠ personality or permanent capacity.
Altitude = stress-response in a specific environment.
Because altitude is contextual. It depends on the domain, the stakes, the leadership environment, and the type of ambiguity they’re asked to hold.
🪞 Self-Reflection
Altitude is not just a hiring concept.
It applies first and foremost to founders.
When I started the company in November 2021, I operated like a classic L2 founder:
capable, fast, resourceful — but heavily anchored in external guidance.
I leaned hard on our independent board member, who had L5 altitude and decades of experience.
But I learned something counterintuitive:
👉 When a founder over-anchors in someone else’s altitude, they stop developing their own.
For two years, I executed, but I wasn’t building the internal systems, clarity, or decisiveness the company needed.
In October 2023, the cord effectively cut.
No more scaffolding.
No more external altitude.
Just me, a nearly depleted runway, and a company that still had a real shot if I leveled up fast.
That was the real beginning.
Since then, the work has been:
L1 → L2 → L3 → L4
clarity → systems → speed → altitude
And candidly, ChatGPT was the lucky catalyst.
It helped me replace what I lost externally and forced me to build the altitude I was missing.
The result:
We have more runway today than we did right after our seed round in November 2021 and the company is operating with more clarity, discipline, and altitude than ever before.
🎯 Final Thought
I believe altitude is the single greatest predictor of survival in a zero-to-one company.
I tried every traditional hiring and evaluation method for three years.
None of it worked.
Once I started hiring and evaluating through this lens, everything became easier:
clarity
speed
decision making
culture
People stop guessing.
You stop over compensating.
The company starts compounding.
Kaeya