Why Your Lowest Performer Sets the Bar | How We Fired Half Our Team and 10x'd Performance | Why You Must Fire Faster | Why Reference Checks Matter More Than You Think with Cat Noone, CEO & Co-founder, Stark
If you don’t enforce the bar, you lower it.
This episode tackles the uncomfortable line between being humane and looking out for employees while also being a high-performing organization - and what a real culture reset looks like when you’ve let it slip.
Our guest is Cat Noone who went through such a major reset herself with the company she co-founded, Stark - which is trusted by over 50,000+ companies and >$10M raised from Uncork and us at focal.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:46 - How being hell-bent on mission while avoiding "bro culture" backfired
03:54 - The early warning signs that performance was drifting at Stark
04:14 - Why I stopped doing reference checks and paid the price
08:38 - How the lowest performer sets your company's bar, not the best
09:17 - When busy work replaces real productivity in remote teams
12:32 - You can't have shitty input AND shitty output - pick one
15:01 - Why founder insecurity about being "employee friendly" kills companies
18:28 - The brutal emotional cost of firing people you've worked with from day one
25:00 - How to communicate layoffs to survivors and rebuild momentum
29:39 - Why urgency beats speed for maintaining quality standards
33:38 - Demo Thursdays as quality control checkpoints, not show and tell
37:06 - The four-day work week experiment and why Fridays aren't free
40:01 - Why most startup principles are worthless wallpaper
44:12 - If you're going to cut deep, cut deeper - don't play it safe
45:58 - Move fast and break things is an excuse to ship shit
48:34 - Get an executive coach before you think you need one
This episode tackles the uncomfortable line between being humane and looking out for employees while also being a high-performing organization - and what a real culture reset looks like when you’ve let it slip.
Our guest is Cat Noone who went through such a major reset herself with the company she co-founded, Stark - which is trusted by over 50,000+ companies and >$10M raised from Uncork and us at focal.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:46 - How being hell-bent on mission while avoiding "bro culture" backfired
03:54 - The early warning signs that performance was drifting at Stark
04:14 - Why I stopped doing reference checks and paid the price
08:38 - How the lowest performer sets your company's bar, not the best
09:17 - When busy work replaces real productivity in remote teams
12:32 - You can't have shitty input AND shitty output - pick one
15:01 - Why founder insecurity about being "employee friendly" kills companies
18:28 - The brutal emotional cost of firing people you've worked with from day one
25:00 - How to communicate layoffs to survivors and rebuild momentum
29:39 - Why urgency beats speed for maintaining quality standards
33:38 - Demo Thursdays as quality control checkpoints, not show and tell
37:06 - The four-day work week experiment and why Fridays aren't free
40:01 - Why most startup principles are worthless wallpaper
44:12 - If you're going to cut deep, cut deeper - don't play it safe
45:58 - Move fast and break things is an excuse to ship shit
48:34 - Get an executive coach before you think you need one
Creators and Guests
Host
Pascal Unger
Co-founder / Managing Partner at focal.vc We lead pre-seeds in North America with up to $1M: We exclusively back AI native software startups at the very start. Thereafter, we help them get off the ground better and faster, supported by a network > 200 GTM executives. That's our singular, unwavering focus.