OTOH (writing from 20-year working experience with two thirds of it in early stage startups) more often than not founders are not actually competent technically or otherwise.
And “letting people do their job” at best means a permission to speak up and endlessly argue with conflicting opinions from colleagues, but not a permission to execute if that means commanding others to do something, because the delegation of power to do that is not being given due to the aforementioned lack of expertise and inability to judge if an idea is good or bad.
I think a lot of companies get stuck in a "mess middle" where they've outgrown founder mode, but the people brought in to be responsible for various parts of the org chart are not actually empowered.
So you no longer have the permissive open structure of a small company, but are still small enough that the founder is arbitrarily/implicitly making a lot of decisions that have on paper been delegated.
For ICs/people lower down the org chart this is extremely disheartening because you end up reporting to someone who doesn't actually make the decisions, but instead shields you from the decision maker & the decision making process.
