Want Your Company To Keep Innovating? Hire People Who Think Like Owners

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Jeff Bezos’s two-pizza rule is the stuff of startup legend. With Amazon in hypergrowth, Bezos stipulated that every internal team had to be small enough to be fed with just two pizzas. The logic? Smaller teams are more nimble; they move faster; there’s lower costs to failure. But above all, small teams mean ownership.

When a company reaches a certain size, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the innovation that gave it momentum in the first place. How do you sustain startup spirit and energy as the business grows? How do you keep up hockey-stick growth, year after year, instead of settling into a plateau of complacency?

In large part, it comes down to finding people who think like owners — and giving them the tools and freedom to thrive. Over the course of growing three companies, hiring people with an owner mindset has helped me build quickly and run lean. Most important, it enables one of the rarest things in business: innovation at scale.

Here’s what makes owner-types tick, where to find them, and how to lead them.

In my experience, people with an owner mindset also have an intense bias for action and speed. To me, it’s the difference between someone simply floating an idea and someone coming forward with an idea and a product demo.

Finding people with an owner mindset

To have an owner mindset, you don’t need to have started a business yourself, though it can help. At core, thinking like an owner means being a builder. For someone with that attitude, starting from a blank slate isn’t scary. It’s exciting.

In my experience, people with an owner mindset also have an intense bias for action and speed. To me, it’s the difference between someone simply floating an idea and someone coming forward with an idea and a product demo.

So, where do you find these people? Many of them have worked in early-stage startups, whether they succeeded or not, and learned invaluable lessons. But they can also come from larger companies where the same kind of mentality is encouraged. Ultimately, it’s not the size of the company that matters — it’s the level of autonomy and accountability that people are given. 

Importantly, this isn’t just my opinion. The impact of this kind of mindset has been codified and quantified. According to Bain, only about 7 percent of businesses hang onto a “founder mentality” as they grow — but they account for more than half of the value created in the stock market. And these companies consistently defy the odds: While peers struggle with size and complexity and inevitably slow down, they remain laser-focused on the customer mission that brought them early success.

But getting people with an owner mindset in the door is just the start. You also need to know how (and how not) to lead them.

How to lead owner types

For the most part, the key to leading people with an owner mindset is to get out of their way.

My top question for them as their leader: How can I help you? The idea is to remove any blockers that stop them from doing what they do best: making things happen.

One powerful way to do this — even inside a large company — is by building startups within a startup. In basic form, this means creating small teams of self-motivated people whose leader is effectively a startup CEO. Each team is responsible for finding product-market fit and creating a product that can stand on its own.

The idea is to give these owner types all the tools they need — and remove the blockers standing in their way — so that it’s easier for them to succeed inside the company than outside it.

They have access to the same sales and marketing, tech, and other resources as the larger company. But to maximize innovation, they’re free from many of the limits that would constrain a mature product or a bigger team, and we’re also there to catch them if they fall.

At the end of the day, a punitive environment around failure crushes initiative. Plus, even misfires can be additive. When Amazon’s Fire smartphone bombed, the team salvaged the technology to develop what became the Alexa smart home service. A leader’s job is to frame success as an individual outcome and failure as a collective one.

If you’re the only person who thinks like an owner, there’s a ceiling on growth and new ideas.

Unlock exponential growth

The real ROI of hiring for an owner mindset is a radically distinct growth trajectory. If you’re the only person who thinks like an owner, there’s a ceiling on growth and new ideas. But when the whole team has a mindset of ownership, that translates to accountability, creativity, and initiative at every level of the company.

That lets companies maintain hockey-stick growth and innovation well beyond the startup phase, finding new inflection points along the way — much like Amazon. Besides branching out from e-commerce to become the world’s top cloud services provider, it’s launched several AI offerings and hovers around a $2 trillion valuation. At the end of the day, not a bad ROI on two pizzas.

Thank you for reading! For more insights from my experience as a serial entrepreneur and how we can harness the power of software to change the world, subscribe to Entrepreneurship and Leadership.